Me and several friends came together to produce a shortfilm, that we are trying to (FOR EXPERIMENTING PURPOSES) get running on the playdate. One of the major issues we face is that the film project in size is 69.3 MB in size. The video fill is in MP4 format. I am using an online editor to convert the video to PDV, and for unknown reasons the size increases from 69.3MB to 212MB. Why is that?
Lastly, our audio is converted from WAV to PDA, and it for some reason is also 200MB when the original size was 24MB.
MY MAIN QUESTION: How can I make these files smaller without loss in video or audio qaulity?
Part of the reason the size increases so much is that PDV is a lossless format -- there is no quality drop to save space. Also, if you're converting a lot of audio, to reduce the size you can encode it with ADPCM, downmix it to mono, or both.
Oh! And assuming you want the short film to display on the Playdate screen, you'll need for it to have a resolution of 400x240 or less.
My apologies that it took so long to reply to you.. holidays and all bad me distracted.
Regarding ADPCM, can you go more into detail about that and what is something simple I could use to encode it through?
I realize a Google search could answer this but if you have a recommendee method, that would be helpful due to first hand knowledge or experience
On a side note: I had the video file down scaled from 1080p to 720p. Which the playdate seems to handle but not very well. I should bring that down some more to 480p I think to help on size.
I can't think of any reason the audio would get bigger.. PDA is PCM data just like WAV--in fact, for 16-bit data the only difference between the two is the header. I'd be happy to take a look at your files if you'd like, try and figure out what's blowing up. Also, if you've got a mac you might have better luck with the encoder app: Video encoder (work in progress, mac only) - #23 by dave I still haven't gotten a portable command-line version running yet, but I'm working in that general area right now so hopefully I'll be able to pay that some attention soon.
Thank you kindly for this Matt. I am in the lab today poking around with the information everyone has supplied today. So thank you (Everyone) in advance.
Dave, I tried to make a bootable Mac OS USB, but I am so unfamiliar with mac, as I've stayed away from their products for some time. I am not particularly a fan of Apple products or their business models. Having the Video Encoder for Linux or Windows would be incredibly helpful because a vast majority of computer users fall into that bracket.
Regarding sharing the files (At this time), I would need to clear it with the other guys first, as the end goal is to release it on Itch,io to the community. If I cant get this sorted out in a reasonable way, could I revisit your request? I'd like to be able to try and figure this out for myself (As a learning curve).
After me and a buddy of mine poking around with it last night, we determined two things: One, mp3 is the more ideal format and it cuts the file size (as a whole) in half, and secondly the issue with Bloating was the amount of frames. We were running the project at 60 Frames Per Second (Which explained the unreasonable 512 MB PDV, When we switched to 30 FPS it cut the size in half again, (Which at the time of posting this thread I hadn't realized FPS being an issue). Lastly we settled on a nice smooth 18 FPS which brought the accumulative file down to a total of 170 MB, which is quiet Ideal. I want to thank everyone for their help.
IF THERE IS A WAY I CAN DECREASE THE FILE SIZE MORE OR COMPRESS THE FILE WITHOUT LOSING ANY MORE QUALITY, THIS WOULD BE EXTREMELY HELPFUL.
I think of you list the properties of your video isn't an app like Media Info we can let you know which properties can be more ideal for Playdate. 170MB is still way too big for Playdate.
