Long-time still photographer new to video: a couple questions

[PSA DC-9-30]

Wasn't sure whether to put this in the Beginner's forum or here. Anyway, I have a slide show of about 40 still photos that I created in PowerPoint. This runs about 15 mins, but when I saved it as an mp4 file from PowerPoint, the filesize is 283 MB. I was wondering how to cut down the file size without too much loss of quality. I have Lightroom 4.4 and also Premiere Elements 11 (which I have installed but not used yet). What would be the best approach?

Also, I would be interested in recommendations for books on creating and post-processing digital video written for readers with a good background in digital (and film) still photography.

Thanks
Kevin

[bcooter]

Wasn't sure whether to put this in the Beginner's forum or here. Anyway, I have a slide show of about 40 still photos that I created in PowerPoint. This runs about 15 mins, but when I saved it as an mp4 file from PowerPoint, the filesize is 283 MB. I was wondering how to cut down the file size without too much loss of quality. I have Lightroom 4.4 and also Premiere Elements 11 (which I have installed but not used yet). What would be the best approach?

Also, I would be interested in recommendations for books on creating and post-processing digital video written for readers with a good background in digital (and film) still photography.

Thanks
Kevin

Download wondershare and do some testing.    The codec is important but the most important part of quality vs. data size is bit rate.  High bit rate better quality, low bit rate . . . well you get the idea.

You also didn't mention if you were placing this online, or in a download package, etc.

IMO
BC

[Petrus]

The file you got is not unreasonably large for a 15 minute video. The problem is that video with reasonable resolution (for me small HD 720*1280) can not be all that small if some kind of quality needs to be preserved. The size like yours is really only a problem if you need to send it around as an e-mail attachment. If you upload it to Vimeo or YouTube it is fine, as it is if you use Dropbox or WeSendIt to distribute it, not to mention USB-sticks.

The ideal for non-moving slide shows would be a totally different compression algorithm, which would result in a file not bigger than pile of equally sized mid-quality JPEGs, but I am not aware of such thing, at least in widespread use. What is the size of the PowerPoint file? Many people have PP on their machines.