Hi, I'm not a really tech savy guy, so I'm hoping you guys can help me out with this. I'm trying to get into grad school for film and I have to sumbit a portfolio. The requirements say that a video cannot exceed 60 mb per file. I understand that mb don't necessarily equal time but rather quality. However, can anyone give me a better understanding of this, or a rough guesstimate of what 60 mb equals in terms of time?
60MB could equal six seconds or sixty minutes, depending on the codec and quality. Do the guidelines tell you what formats are acceptable?
With flv, I'll guess that at youtube's low resolution, 60mb is around 30 minutes. 360p --> maybe 30 minutes 420p --> maybe 15 minutes 720p --> maybe 10 minutes HD --> maybe 5 minutes
I think it would be best to figure out how long your video will be, then target the final video file to that. 60MB isn't very much as far as videos go. As Jadzia indicates, HD quality is going to make for a pretty short video. You could get as much as an hour out of 60MB if you go with low enough quality. One of the (few) nice features of Windows Movie Maker is that you can target a specific file size for output. This might come in handy in your case. It will automatically adjust the quality. The downside is, of course, the longer your video, the worse the quality will be.
If you are not tech savvy, windows movie maker is the perfect tool to use because it is easy and has the side benefit of being free. Just play around with it for a while and you will get it pretty fast. About the time aspect, rather than making the movie first and then converting it to the lower quality needed for 60mb, determine the lowest quality of video you are willing to accept and then you will know how long the movie can be. That way you won't end up with a 45 minute video that is painful to watch. Again, a little playing around with movie maker will let you know exactly what the videos look like at different levels of quality.