How do I save it as an mpeg (or at least mp4)

[camhernanity]

Right now, all I can save it as is an avi file which is HORRIBLE. It means my 5 minute video is 20 GB, which is OUTRAGEOUS. A well made movie file can be 2 hours and half that size. The compressor I'm using doesn't seem to compress them right, is there any way I can naturally save it so it's not so large. I heard so many good things about the program I really hope I'll be able to use it so I don't have to buy something else

[Malix]

1st of all: AVI is just a container, it can contain pretty much anything (very compressed & small to uncompressed and ridiculously huge). To reiterate: AVI does not automatically mean the filesize will be big.

DxTory only supports AVI-container, but you can switch codecs. If you need to go small, use lossy codec like x264vfw. If you need to have lossless, look into MagicYUV, Lagarith and UtVideo Codec.

The reason why video captures are big, is because compression actually is pretty heavy operation, and you need to save the frames into the video as fast as possible. There are hardware accelerated capture methods (shadowplay and whatever-AMD-counterpart-is, for example), those just unload the compression duty to dedicated hardware which is mad fast, but they are still lossy (but with high enough bitrate, pretty good).

Basically: Speed, Quality, Small filesize. Pick 2.

edit:

A well made movie file can be 2 hours and half that size

And the compression probably took 4 hours or more

[camhernanity]

Ah! THank you so much. I realized I sounded a little ancy in my original post. But thank you for this, hopefully it will be able to be much smaller this time around

[camhernanity]

Actually can you suggest what to do out of the pre-installed codecs? I can get some later but for now, do you know which ones might be best?

[Malix]

Those windows built-in codecs etc are pretty much not suited for realtime high resolution video capture.

The general concensus on this board seems to be that:
1) for lossless capture: MagicYUV, Lagarith, UtVideo Codec
2) for lossy capture: x264vfw or variants of it (some encode with amd-gpu, making them a fair bit faster)

edit: the off-topic subforum contains few threads about different codecs, if you want to have a looksie.