Video and audio codecs

Codec is short for Compressor/Decompressor, indicating the software used for compressing/decompressing the video clip. If a codec isn't used, a feature film will take up a lot of space on your hard drive – as much as 30 GB. Such amounts of data are always hard to handle, so there's a lot of sense in compressing the clip. And it actually doesn't take much to boil down the gigabytes to megabytes.

If you make your own recordings, we recommend the PicVideo MJPEG V2 Compression codec for video and for audio the CCITT-Alaw codec. In most cases that will do. An alternative and excellent choice is a combination of the Morgan Multimedia M-JPEG codec and the PCM audio codec.

For supercompressed files, MPEG-4 V2 may be a good solution.

The Avid MJPEG codec also yields excellent results.

For conversion the same advice applies, but you don't have to worry about audio. Use VirtualDub or Digital Media Converter. VirtualDub is free, and Digital Media Converter is inexpensive ($40) and can also be downloaded free for trial.

A trial version of the PicVideo codec V2 once could be downloaded from http://www.pegasusimaging.com/picvideomjpeg.htm. Now they only offer V3 that sucks big time. Use it at your own risk or try to obtain V2 elsewhere.

A shareware version of the Morgan codec may be downloaded http://www.morgan-multimedia.com/

MPEG-4 V2 is normally present on any Windows system. If not, download it from http://www.undercut.org/msmpeg4

The Avid MJPEG codec can be downloaded for free at several sites, eg. http://www.downloadatoz.com/codecs/avid-m-jpeg-codec,download.html

Make sure the right codecs (for recording only) are chosen on the tabs Setup/video configuration/video cache and Setup/video configuration/standard Audio Device.