Some guys helped me make a great quicktime video. And then gave it to me uncompressed. And both are out of town. How do I compress it from over 300 meg to a reasonable size? I'm not sure Quicktime even allows uploading videos that size, and google gives me conflicting info on how big a file is allowed in youtube. At any rate is 324 meg reasonable for a 4 minute video. If not how do I compress it on Windows 7.

On the low end uncompressed standard definition video at 8 bit takes up 20 MB/second, so that would be 4,800 MB. What they gave you is already very compressed, but it probably isn't set up for streaming.

Quicktime is also just a wrapper, it's not an actual encoding standard, so you'll have to dig a little deeper to find out what codec was used for encoding, then you'll need to transcode it into something that is suitable. h.264 is popular and good for streaming HD video at a small file size.

They most likely gave it to you in a larger format so that you could encode it using your a preferred codec with less loss to the image. Transcoding from an already highly compressed format can leave lots of artifacts.

Unfortunately I do most of my video work on Macs so I don't have a good recommendation for software on the PC for encoding the video.

Windows live movie maker is the default video editor. Here are the settings it shows:

Width 1280 pixels
Height 720 pixels
bit rate 8000 kps
Frame rate 30fps

Which of these do I reduce?

[On Edit] My problem was not file size but account setup. However, I still had probably best have a lower res alternative to full size out there. So the question of which to cut remains. My instinct is size (width and height), but not my field.

Try Handbrake - it's free and has a Windows version.

[link]

Ask it to generate a 640x360 H.264 .mov file at 1mbps. You can also reduce the audio bitrate to get the file size down further.

If Handbrake doesn't recognize the file (which I can't determine since you don't know the codec), try MPEG Streamclip [link] It's a little less user-friendly than Handbrake but it can handle a wider variety of file types.

Does anyone have any recommendations for usability resources? Not just having users perform usability testing, but also about setting usability standards, performing IT evals, etc.

Toodledo is the first package so far to have both recurring options, so I'm going to try migrating there.

I have a very strange problem with Chrome on my MacBook Pro. Ever since I installed the last OS X update on it, Chrome has problems displaying b.org. All other sites work fine. But whenever I go to a new page on b.org, the first screen displays fine, but when I scroll down, there's a 2" gap in the browser where nothing displays. But when I do a select-all, I see the invisible text, and if I then unselect everything, the screen displays fine.

Handbrake is wonderful.

Also I had a weird problem with Chrome after the update which I fixed by deleting my cookies. Before doing that I tested my theory that that was the problem by going to the incognito window. You can do the same thing. Open an incognito window. Log in to the board. (Since you are in incognito, none of your cookies will be active and you will need to log in.) If you still have the problem at least you will not have deleted your cookies for nothing. If that fixes your problem then the permenant fix is deleting all cookies for this site.

[edit] My problem was more drastic, so I deleted all cookies, but I think some people are having trouble with cookie corruption since the latest update. But if it is only this site, that it is only this sites cookies that need deleting.

I think I'm trying remember the milk to start.