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help with compressor
I’ll run past my experience so far step by step, it may shed some light on what i need to work on – but I’m having a really hard time getting crisp movs using compressor.
1 – I’m working with PAL compositions created in After effects (720×576)- rendered out as lossless uncompressed animation quicktimes… look great in quicktime player although typically squashed due to pixel ratio
2 – I import the lossless animation into FCP, it looks fine and sharp on the timeline, making sure sequence settings use animation codec (forgot to change this from DV before and animation looked rough in the viewer)
3 – from FCP file menu: export using “quicktime conversion”, I then choose the pre-set: “broadband high”, click the options and the default compressor quality is “high” and set to “H264”. Data rate I set limited to around “150 kbits/sec” (i used to leave it set to “672 kbits/sec” as default but found by lowering this value i got much smaller file sizes without much loss of quality) – frame size is set by default to: 480×360, I leave this alone.
5 – now trying to use compressor – mimicking the pre-sets that previously worked well with quicktime conversion. I click on source setting and select pre-set: “web download, quicktime 7 compatible 800kbps” I have experimented with limiting data rate from 672 to 150 kbit/secs, also i check frame size – set by default to 480×360, i leave this
The trouble is results in compressor are just plain worse than before using FCP’s QT conversion – I have no idea if there is some sort of small box I need to tick or un-tick, the original uncompressed file looks crystal clear… I’m slowly going mad here – cant see why it would look so much worst in compressor apparently using the same settings?
um, yeah!
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4 Replies
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I’d like to know what the deal is, too. I can easily get really nice Windows Media 9 files for the web, but when I try to encode to H.264 for the web, they look like crap. It doesn’t matter if I’m encoding from the PC or the Mac, the H.264 stuff (at twice the bitrate) looks worse than the WM9 stuff. Why is it so hard to get good looking H.264? Maybe there is a quality/crap toggle that I’m missing somewhere?
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whoops meant to post this on the FCP forum – I’ll do it anyway, lets see if someones got the magic solution
um, yeah!
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the weird thing for me is that H264 does look good but only when i use export from FCP: “using quicktime conversion” When I use export: “using compressor” it looks kack
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I usually export from FCP as Quicktime, using the “current settings”. Then I drag that file into Compressor, or QT Pro to make H.264 movies.
Anyway, this isn’t an After Effects question, so it would be best if this was moved to the appropriate COW forum: Compression Techniques or Final Cut Pro.
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