First Movie Bloated

[CockneyViking]

I shot my first movie today. A couple of problems sprang up immediately which were:

• The .MOV files a Canon EOS camera produces are huge...2 GB for minutes. The picture and sound quality is good though. Is there any way to reduce the enormous file size? Can I convert a movie to something that is more compressed like mpeg4?
• I shot the movie in portrait thinking it could be rotated like a photograph. Can this be done?

I guess there must be a software package that should do both. Many thanks to anyone who can help and suggest something an idiot can use....

 

[st599]

Those .mov files actually sound quite small. Uncompressed HD video is about 1.5GB every 8 seconds. The Canon will also have used an inter-frame camera codec. To edit properly, especially if you're using effects like a rotate and rescale, you'll probably have to transcode to an intra-frame edit codec (http://www.batchframe.com/quick-tips/tip.php?t=3)

Any non-linear editor will be able to rotate and squeeze the picture. It should automatically add black bars down the side (pillarboxing) to maintain the aspect ratio. However be aware that by scaling from1920 to 1080 you're going to lose a lot of detail and the video will be much softer than what you're looking at now.

Lightworks, will import and transcode, then you can add a video rotate and export. The free version will export to YouTube quality video ready for uploading: http://www.talkphotography.co.uk/threads/lightworks-storyboard-edit-tutorial.526372/