Working with digital images

[ecapp]

I'm new here and pretty much camera illiterate. But, my problem is that I shot a short video (20 sec) using my canon sd400 and can not email it! The file says it is 39 mgb but I can only email up to 20 mgb. I tried to winzip it and it did not compress it much at all. How do people send movies through email? Anyway to make the mgb compressed or is there some trick I need to know about. Pleae help!

[Deb]

Hi there Ecapp and welcome!

You can try a couple of things:
1. You could open up a video editor and break your video into, say, three parts. Then email each part separately. Call 'em "chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3" or some such title so your recipient knows in which order to view them.

OR

2. You could upload it to your webspace if you have one. Many email services give you a "homepage" space. If your allowable space isn't large enough for your video to be uploaded in one piece, break it up like above.

[ShutterbugGail]

Hi Ecapp,

Your camera should have come with ZoomBrowser software as well as other programs such as ArcSoft PhotoStudio. ZoomBrowser lets you "export" movies. During the process, you can reduce the file size by changing such things as the image size, frame rate and image quality. The smaller the image size, the slower the frame rate, and the lower the image quality, the smaller the file size.

Some visual quality will be lost (a lot of you compress it too much) but at least you will be able to email your family and friends a movie file. I do this all the time. I eport the origina file and save it at different settings until I come up with a good balance between file size and image quality.

Zoombrowser alsos let you edit movies. So does PhotoStudio but, since you said you were a beginner, Zoombrowser is an easy place to start.

I recently took a short 9.5 MB video file and reduced it in size to .97 MB video file using zoombrowser so I can email it to family members.

Of couse, if changes in file size and image quality are out of the question, Deb's suggestions are the only way to go, other than burning a video on a CD or DVD and mailing it to people.

Take a look at the ZoomBrower software and check out it's help files. The software will walk you through all the steps.

If you have additional questions, let us known.

[ecapp]

Thanks so much for your replies! I received an email back from Canon and they said there is no way to shrink my video in their program. But, they suggested a video editing application??? I think one of your comments also suggested this. What exactly is this and where can I locate this on my computer? I really appreciate your help!!

[ShutterbugGail]

You're very welcome.

Did you install the software that came with your camera? It is called ZoomBrowser? It has a basic, but very nice, video editing program built right into it.

When you download images and videos from your camera, they should open the zoombrowser program (unless you change the settings).

You select your video (or videos) then click on Edit in the Tasks area on the left side of your screen. Then you click on Edit Movie and follow the steps. As I stated in my reply above, the steps are pretty easy but if you get stuck a little, there are great help files in the software which are accessed via the Help menu.

Also reread my reply above for some of the ways to change the file size of the menu when you Export it.

Let us know how it goes.

[ecapp]

Thank you so much! I was able to figure it out in Zoombrowser by editing the image some. I was able to send videos no problem. Thanks so much for your help- it would have been a shame to waste this really cool feature of my camera.

[ubuntuUser]

hi, i use ubuntu and i shrink my movies with ffdshow

this here is linux tutorial but i think it should work the same on windows (although a little different aproach will be needed), though not sure cause i havent tried it (but maybe someone using ubuntu will find it usefull)

you just need to install the ffdshow,  download it here

http://ffdshow.en.softonic.com/

and heres the tutorial

http://ubuntutipstricks.blogspot.com/2007/07/howto-shrink-movies-from-your-digital.html

[kingsin]

I know a software that called WinRAR, it can split a big file into many small ones.

[ShutterbugGail]

Hi kingsin, and welcome to the Q&A Forum!

Thanks so much for sharing the information. I know it will be useful to others.