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Why is quicktim
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11 Replies
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[Kowboy] ” use the media encoder for mailing samples to customers. And some of them are requesting .mov
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Actually the WMP for OSX has been more or less discontinued by MS. Instead you can download the player component of Flip4Mac for free. This plug-in lets the QT Player on Mac play WMV files. It’s pretty cool.
Premiere, BTW, doesn’t do a very good job exporting QT at low bitrates. The problem is that Premiere can’t export anything but I-frames in temporal compression codecs. If you really need QT files, export either an AVI or a high-quality QT file, then reprocess it to QT using AE or QT Pro.
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Ok. Thanx for the tips guys!
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Also, if you can (which I assume since you have clients that $29 isn’t going to break the bank) you should get Quicktime Pro and then you can export an uncompressed avi as was suggested and then have quicktime export that as an Mpeg 4 with H.264 compression (that is what all the quicktime trailers are done in) it looks much better than Windows media.
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[Steve Freebairn] “it looks much better than Windows media.”
Based on the quick test I just ran, I can’t agree with that statement. Maybe I need to upgrade my QT Pro (currently 6.5.2) or maybe I wasn’t using the right codec, but WM looked much better.
I set them up to be the same screen size and bitrate. The file sizes ended up being within a couple hundred KB of each other (the mp4 was the larger). Used Windows Media Encoder for the wmv file and QT Pro for the mp4 file feeding each the same DV codec avi file for input.
Do you know if my version of QT is using the H.264 codec for mpeg4?
Dave
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H.264 is, to my understanding, a subset of MPEG-4. You need to specifically tell QT Pro that you want to use H.264 vs. MPEG-4.
Also, the QT Player on Windows does an absolutley AWFUL job of decoding DV codec AVI files. It introduces a lot of artifacts, like heavy JPEG decompression. So using DV AVI files is not a good basis for a test. An uncompressed AVI file would be better.
For my part, I like both WMV and H.264. H.264 needs an awful long time to encode, but it can get relatively smaller file sizes than plain MPEG-4 (probably also WMV, which is another MPEG-4 variant) at the same quality. But since WMV has a dedicated player app, it has more built-in support for streaming and multiple streams, etc.
Oh, one small correction to my last post in this thread. I said that Premiere can’t do anything but I-frames for temporal compression codecs, but what I left out was that only applies to QuickTime codecs.
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It seems that H.264 is not part of the QuickTime 6, which explains why I can find it.
Does anybody know if QuickTime 7 Pro is playing nice with Windows? I did read of some compatibility problems early on.
Also, does it work well with the current release of the Adobe Production Studio? Everything is mostly working and I would hate to muck it up by messing with the QuickTime installation. Advice please.
[Timothy Kurkoski] “the QT Player on Windows does an absolutley AWFUL job of decoding DV codec AVI files. It introduces a lot of artifacts, like heavy JPEG decompression.”
Tim,
What you describe sound like what happens if the “High Quality” option is not set for the file. When it is set, I see no appreciable difference in DV files played in QT Player or the WM player. (Well, except that the QT player doesn’t do as good a job displaying an interlaced file.)Dave
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[Dave Friend] “Does anybody know if QuickTime 7 Pro is playing nice with Windows? I did read of some compatibility problems early on.”
Been using it since the beta versions. Seems to work fine. Just make sure you get version 7.04 (and nothing prior to that).
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Nice to know. Thanks for the speedy reply Aanarav.
Dave
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What you describe sound like what happens if the “High Quality” option is not set for the file. When it is set, I see no appreciable difference in DV files played in QT Player or the WM player.
Well, I’ll be jiggered. You learn something new every day. Thanks, Dave!
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