Ask Jim why: Small business.

Compressing movie files a big timesaver

September 15, 2003|By James Coates.

Q. What is the best way to compress AVI digital movie files for e-mailing?

-- Richard Nelson, Kalamazoo, Mich

A. You're a man of few words, Mr. N., and I wish the answer could be as terse as the question.

You've raised an issue that's on a lot of people's minds in the rush to produce computer videos for everything from promoting a product to producing in-house training films for posting on the company Intranet.

Here's the background:

A great deal of the video software in the Windows world uses that high-quality audio-video interleave, or AVI, format to create movies with giant resolutions that play beautifully on a computer screen. But these are huge files that are impossible to send using telephone modems and difficult to distribute even with a proper high-speed broadband Internet connection.

Over the years since Microsoft Corp. first introduced AVI, there has been a flood of compression schemes with names like MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 (motion pictures expert group), ASF (advanced systems format) and so forth that all squeeze the size of the files down to far more manageable sizes.

The most common explanation of video compression is the case of the bird flying across a jungle. The jungle stays pretty much the same frame after frame as the bird's wings flap. Compression just covers the bird using a minimum of background changes, thus saving big time on space.

If you are using Windows XP, it is easy and free to simply use the built-in Microsoft Movie Maker program to convert the AVI files to Microsoft's own highly compressed format called WMV (Windows Media Video). It is among the tightest file-squeezers out there.

On the other hand, if you convert files into the MPEG-2 format, it is possible to burn them on ordinary CD-Rs that can play the movie on most home DVD players. An easy way to do this is with such software as Roxio Easy CD Creator 6.0 that contains software to convert AVIs and also includes the modules needed to burn VCDs, or video compact discs.

A less costly way to convert is a popular shareware program called WinMPG Video Convert (, a $30 offering with a free trial period that handles just about any of the conversions you might desire.

Now if I could only compress my answer on this complex topic, we'd all be happier.

Q. I have a dilemma that I think you might find is a common one among your readers (It's certainly common for hundreds of my co-workers.) For many years, I used Microsoft Outlook as my address book. I now work for a company that uses Lotus Notes, so I exported my addresses from Outlook, had them bent and twisted into Lotus Notes conformity by the information technology department, and then uploaded into a Lotus Notes address book.

Additionally, I have a cell phone that I've manually loaded hundreds of numbers into over the course of several months. And I still maintain my Outlook address book at home. I can't see getting Lotus Notes for the home, since it's quite expensive, and I just don't see using all of its features in a home environment, and, to my way of thinking, it's not a very efficient or intuitive address book system (I recall never having to take a class to learn Outlook, but everything in Notes seems to require classroom instruction).

So today I maintain three address book databases (Outlook, cell phone and Notes), which just invites errors and is hugely time consuming. How can I more efficiently maintain my addresses with just one database?

-- Pat Garvy

A. The fix starts with clicking File in Outlook and picking Export and then sending the data from your Microsoft Outlook Contacts into a file format known as CSV, or comma-separated value. It is possible to then use the import feature in Notes to import this CSV text file into Notes' complex address book.

Trouble occurs because Outlook's equally complex fields have different names and are in a different order than in Notes.

I can offer two approaches to the quandary--one down and dirty and the other pretty complex but kind of pretty.

First, instead of messing with all the complex fields in these dueling programs, just create a CSV file with the basics to share among your three devices. Once the address book is exported from Outlook in a CSV format file, load it into Microsoft Excel, which can accept CSV files. Excel will put each field name in adjoining cells at the top and then spread corresponding data for each contact across the sheet as in name, nickname, business phone, home phone, hobby, children's names, etc.

Much of this stuff is useless to the great majority of users, and certainly it isn't suitable for cell phones. So some cleaning is in order.

Decide just the data about your contacts that really matters and eliminate the other fields. You can blow away entire fields of data just by clicking on the field name at the top to select the entire column's contents and hitting delete.