Okay, some time ago, I was making a movie. I imported it into a friend's computer, because mine didn't have firewire. So I wanted to burn the files onto a cd, then take it to my computer to edit it at my leisure. Well, the avi files were obviously too large to fit on a cd, so I tried rendering them as an Mpeg so they'll fit. They fit, all right, but the video is now extremely pixelated. I was using Pinnacle Studio 8, but I chose the wrong settings for the mpeg when I compressed it. So now it looks crappy. Months later (now), I'm wondering if there's anyway I can "uncompress" that file. I have the compressed file that I burned to the cd, but I don't know if I needed something even more closer to the source, y'know what I mean? I figured it wasn't possible, but someone was trying to tell me it was. Just wondering.
You'd probably have to redigitize your footage and use the proper type of compression. I don't imagine any amount of rendering is going to fully compensate for a bad file. It's a learning experience. My advice, if you can't redigitize the footage, is to go ahead and edit it anyhow. The hard pixels will just be part of the aesthetic. It'll still work if you have a good story and decent acting and photography. Next time you'll be more careful.
Yeah, I figured. I had actually already edited it and all (I made it for someone's birthday), but I had recently rediscovered the old footage I had, and wished that I could somehow make it look better and re-edit it. But trust me, I don't make that mistake anymore.
Unfortunately, it is impossible to decompress the footage, as it isn't really compressed to begin with. It is in a different format, meaning that you took your original footage and made a copy of it as an mpeg or whatever. Its not like a .zip or .sit file, which compresses your footage to be decompressed later into its original format.
If it really bothers you to have pixelated footage, you should maybe recapture all your footage on your friends computer and start from scratch, using your current edit as a guideline. You would need to be careful as to what settings you convert too, ensuring that it stays fairly low in size but high in quality.
As a last resort in the future, you could always compress it into MPEG2 format, rather than MPEG1.... this will make your video look a lot better when editing it, and you can easily transport 20-30 minutes of MPEG2 video on a standard CD-R.
Agreed. Mpeg-2 is the standard for DVDs and standard DVDs have 4.7gb, so...