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Best encoding option for exhibition display?
I’ve made my grad film in AE using stills shot on a nikon D70. With the stills having a native resolution of 3008×2000 its obviously pretty fine quality, but I’m stumped as to how I can exhibit it.
We’re having a week long degree show in London over the summer, and I’m planning on showing it looped on a plasma display. The problem is that I don’t know how to deliver it to the screen – I’m not about to sit my G5 next to it for a week as that would somewhat impede my ability to do any work, which means that at the moment I’m left putting it on DVD and, neccessarily, mpeg2, which is taking my lovely film and applying some horrible compression to it.
Is there anyway I can use a better codec and still play from a DVD or similar player? I’ve been looking at the KISS players (https://www.kiss-technology.com/?p=dvd1&v=users), they say they can playback DIVX – I’m afraid I don’t know too much about codecs – would this be better than mpeg2? If anyone has any experience with these or has any other suggestions they would be gratefully recieved.
Thanks,
TomPS – If anyone knows of anywhere in London I can get a good price on plasma hire please let me know, it’s somewhat frustrating being on a student (rather than a ‘large mutli-national conference’) budget 🙂
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5 Replies
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You don’t say what your composition screen size is, nor whether you’re going to spring for a hi-def-capable plasma.
If your screen is standard def only, then mpeg2 is it, really, at PAL screen size 720×576, wide screen or not.
If you have a high def screen you could try outputting to a high def (screen size and) codec. We’re still a way away from the arrival of Blu Ray or HD DVD, but short programmes can be compressed with HD playback codecs and delivered from a standard DVDROM or hard disc.
For codec choice, Quicktime’s H.264 looks good, and Microsoft’s WMV compression choices include both decent mpeg4 and Video 9 – an mpeg4 variant – both very similar to H.264 quality.
Good luck with it.
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Depending on the plasma-screen’s native resolution I’d go with:
– SD DVD 16×9 FHA
– HD DVD MPEG2
– HD DVD h264From the tests I’ve done MPEG2 at high-def looks super and you fit about 30 mins of material on a standard DVD-R. However, you will need a playback system here. The only thing that will “just work” is the SD DVD in a DVD-player.
You will not gain anything from going to a higher resolution than the final display output. Running QuickTime h.264 is fantastic, from my tests much better than WMV9. However, the format is quite system-demanding at playback.
Photo-jpeg at 75% will give you great quality as well at quite modest bitrates and will not require half the machine h264 does.
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Thanks for the replies, I think that due to cost constraints I’m going to have to get an SD widescreen plasma. Right now I’m working at 768×576 wide, does that mean that with this set up there would be little value in going over MPEG2?
If I were able to get hold of an HD display the source footage that I have would comfortably go to an HD comp size, and at around 5mins in length the animation would fit onto a standard DVD. The questions is is there is anyway I could play this back without needing a fairly well spec’ed computer in the vicinity?
Thanks again,
T
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Forget DVD players that play DivX. Forget HD DVD playback.
Here are your ONLY practical choices:
1) Render at a HD spec. Hire an HD display. Play media from a PC or Mac to the display.
or
2) Render to PAL spec (720×576) – preferably widescreen if you are hiring a widescreen Plasma. Hire a HD or SD display. If the SD is cheaper, do it – there’s no advantage with the HD display. Playback from PC/Mac, or from conventional DVD.
Personally, I’d use DVD. If the player is damaged or stolen, you’ve lost very little compared to a full computer. Plus you get to keep working on your machine for the week. People are so used to watching badly compressed video at the wrong aspect ratio that they’ll never notice the quality loss that YOU percieve when it’s encoded to MPEG2. Just keep the encoded data rate as high as you can (below 10 mbits including audio).
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I don’t know of any cheap/free Mac stuff, but I know, with Windows, if you want the highest possible resolution to display your high-res good work on the plasma with little to no compression, I would suggest you look at the free version of Wings Platinum called Wings Basic from AvStumpfl.
This is what it says from the Help Files for Wings –
If you have used digital pictures in designing your show, you can output EXE presentations via the integrated player. An EXE presentation can be started by double-clicking it and runs on virtually every up-to-date computer with Windows operating system. For presentation of high-resolution images Wings Platinum uses 3D graphics cards hardware acceleration. The images contained in the file can be copy protected to prevent unauthorized usage of images by third parties to the largest extent possible when passing them on. Password protection can also be enabled additionally. See Creating an EXE presentation. in the Help Files for the ‘how to’.Wings Basic comes with one track of Audio and one Picture track (for stills only). You can dissolve between pictures on the same track merely by overlapping them. The dissolve rate can be adjusted manually if required. For further help, you can ask at https://groups.yahoo.com/group/multidisplays but you would have to send in a request to join first. Just mention your interest in Wings in your application to join and it should be approved within hours.
Before you start creating your project specs in Wings, I suggest you first find out what the native resolution of the plasma is that you will be renting. There are 1024×768 (XGA) plasmas for rental out there that are not expensive at all. This is definitely better than the usual video res which is near SVGA (800×600). Alternatively, just go ahead and create a XGA project and then hire a XGA plasma.
Obviously, you will need a Windows PC to present/run the EXE show. If I’m not wrong, you could write a very basic DOS code in an autoexec.bat file to loop the file, or ask someone here or at the multidisplay forum aforesaid to do it for you free. If you are from London, I have a good friend in London who may be willing to help you source a plasma, write the loop code for you, etc…since you are a student. He uses both Mac and Windows PCs. Contact me off-line at ‘tlsc at pc.jaring.my’ substituing ‘at’ with u-know-what.
Thomas Leong
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