-
SEttings for screening HD from a MacMini and a 12″ Powerbook 1.5GHz
Hi,
I am an artist, and I’m having an exhibition VERY soon, and it just dawned on me that I have no clue to what setting/codex I should use to be able to screen a 1280 x 720 25p film on a HD projector from a MacMini and a 12″ Powerbook 1.5 GHz.Do any of you gurus out there have som advice for me?
Eva
-
6 Replies
-
Does this film exist in digital format (a file) already or do you need to capture from a tape and get it into your mac mini? The codec you would use will depend on what the film was shot in. I’ve never tried to run HD from a Mac Mini – I imagine it would be possible in some instances – but I can also imagine it sometimes not being fast enough to support some HD codecs.
Give me some more info.
* * *
Paul Escandon – Lead Editor @ Outdoor Channel
Producer | Director – Oremus Productions
oremusproductions.com | blog
Apple Certified Trainer – Final Cut Pro
Adjunct Professor of Media – JPCU
—
MacPro Quad-core XEON
8Gb ram, ATI Radeon X1900 XT, 2TB internal RAID
2 20″ Dell UltraSharps + Matrox MXO & 23″ ACD -
Hi,
The project has been edited as DVCPRO HD in FCP studio 2. Now I just need to make a quicktime file, or similar, that doesn’t overpower the macmini and powerbook.
Eva -
As you probably know the Mac Mini needs to have Final Cut Studio installed also to play the DVCPRO HD file that you created from Final Cut. Is Final Cut installed in that machine by any chance? If it is – I would say just try playing the native quicktime to see if the machine can handle it.
If that isn’t an option then you may want to give the Motion-Jpeg codec a shot. I’m not sure exactly how this codec stacks up in terms of taxing your system with other codecs… but I have compressed HD footage to MJPEG at 75% quality before and I couldn’t see any quality loss. So that’s an option too.
Give it a shot and see if it works out. I know H.264 is very taxing so that’s probably not an option.
* * *
Paul Escandon – Lead Editor @ Outdoor Channel
Producer | Director – Oremus Productions
oremusproductions.com | blog
Apple Certified Trainer – Final Cut Pro
Adjunct Professor of Media – JPCU
—
MacPro Quad-core XEON
8Gb ram, ATI Radeon X1900 XT, 2TB internal RAID
2 20″ Dell UltraSharps + Matrox MXO & 23″ ACD -
You may struggle in many codecs to play anything of that frame size on a single processor Mac mini. My dual 1.66 mini will just play 720p material, but nothing higher.
You could certainly try M-JPEG, it’s pretty efficient, but you still have to shove it through a pretty poor integrated gfx card.
Not sure how you could connect a drive to a Mac mini fast enough to play DVCProHD natively – it’s too fast for a standard firewire drive.
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live broadcast.
OB Server 1 HD – Mobile FCP editing done right.
https://www.editecuk.com/OBServer2.html -
Oh – just noticed you don’t specify what Mac mini you have. If it’s the dual 1.66ghz intel Mini, you can play 720p H.264 video on it (I can play the HD trailers from Apple on mine). It’ll look great, just play around with the compression so the bitrate is not too high, but the picture is clean – start with the default H.264 quicktime export from FCP, and set the frame size to 1280×720.
Ben
Editec Broadcast Editing Ltd
EVS & FCP specialists for live broadcast.
OB Server 1 HD – Mobile FCP editing done right.
https://www.editecuk.com/OBServer2.html -
I have that Powerbook, and I doubt you could get it to reliably playback 720p with a high quality file.
A lot of people are talking about playback through FCP, but I’m assuming you just want to export to some delivery format and just open the file in QuickTime. Assuming you have the computers already, I’d try exporting to MPEG4 and h.264 at various bitrates and see what you can get to playback.
This in anecdotal but, in my experience, my powerbook handles MPEG 4 beter than h.264 since it’s so processor intensive to decompress.
You could also just try downloading some trailers from Apple’s site at different frame sizes and see if they’ll play back. If they do, just look at the settings and use those. They’re encodes are always really good.
Zak
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up