• Compression Techniques

  Follow up to previous H264 question

  Posted by Mike Sussman on June 9, 2009 at 7:48 pm

  Last month I posted the following questions about how H264 video looks washed out.

  https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/20/862325

  Sorry it took me almost a month before I tried it out but I just imported a clip of video into Avid Media Composer that was encoded H264 and it looked noticeably washed out. But just to make sure I saved the exact same file again but this time with Animation codec instead as the only difference, and the results in Avid (not in a standalone Quicktime player) are obvious when the two files are side by side in Avid MC.

  Huh? I thought this issue was only a Quicktime player bug and wouldn’t show up when imported into Avid? Please explain. The file rendered in Animation codec is 100 meg while the file rendered in H264 codec is only 6 megs. Aside from the washed out colors (loss of contrast) it looked sharp and clean and I’d love to have my file sizes only 6% of what I’ve been previously rendering to but this washed out look just won’t fly. I can post screengrabs if necessary.

  Thanks

  Daniel Low replied 17 years, 2 months ago 2 Members · 3 Replies
• 3 Replies

• 

  Daniel Low

  June 10, 2009 at 9:58 am

  Like I said in response to your previous post, this is not a Quicktime player bug, it’s a Quicktime bug.

  https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/20/862335

  Avid uses Quicktime to process Quicktime files and as such the bug is still present.

  Aside from that there are huge differences between the Animation Codec and the H.264 codec.

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• 

  Mike Sussman

  June 10, 2009 at 2:46 pm

  Thanks. So if Avid operates on the Quicktime process, does this mean that I should just avoid using H264 for output that is intended to be imported into Avid? Otherwise it’s fine to use H264 in certain other situations but just not for Avid imports?
• 

  Daniel Low

  June 10, 2009 at 2:59 pm

  No, H.264 is not the right codec to use to move media between systems. I’d use the ProRes codec, if you have to keep file sizes down for whatever reason use the PhotoJPEG codec.

  __________________________________________________________________
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