• Compression Techniques

  Solution for 30 minute SD quicktime on internet

  Posted by Scott Turner on October 30, 2009 at 9:49 pm

  I’m looking to turn a thirty minute video shot in DV into a downloadable quicktime file to send to people…quality is very important, but I also don’t want to overestimate someone’s broadband and have them give up on the file download.

  The hosting site is plenty fast, so on my connection uploading a 1500kb 2-pass H.264 file that results in 300mb is fine for me. There’s some definite video chunking because I selected to preserve the 640×480 square pixels resolution…I did this because the video has subtitles, and it’s critical that they’re legible. I could drop it down to get some more quality out of it, but for the legibility I don’t want to go too small.

  Any suggestions about this process? I guess at this point I’ve got a product I’m happy with, but if it could look a little better/go a little smaller I’d be very pleased. I’ve also been de-interlacing from the Final Cut sequence instead of using compressor with the motion adaptive setting because at the quality I’m running at I haven’t seen too big a difference, and the ten-hour plus renders are a problem.

  Running Final Cut Suite 3, using compressor to export the file. Any help would be appreciated.

  Scott Turner replied 16 years, 10 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Chris Blair

  October 31, 2009 at 7:55 pm

  If you want to keep it at 640×480, it would be hard to get it smaller than 300MB and retain quality.

  If you go down some in size, say to 448×332 or somewhere in there, you could probably cut the file size in half and still get very good quality. Not sure about readability of sub-titles at that size, depends on font, weight, color etc. All you can do it test and see. What we do is compress 1 minute then multiply the file size by 30 to see how big it will be….or even do just 30 seconds and multiply by 60…you get the idea.

  You could also try things like reducing the frame-rate, reducing the audio sampling rate, converting to mono etc. to help cut the file size down a little more. Most people won’t notice the difference playing back from a PC anyway.

  Chris Blair
  Magnetic Image, Inc.
  Evansville, IN
  http://www.videomi.com
• 

  Scott Turner

  November 4, 2009 at 12:49 am

  I ended up exporting as 24 fps, squashing the audio a bit (including your suggestion to mono), and I was able to cut it way down while still maintaining 640×480. I decided that 448×332 was just a little too small.

  Thanks a bunch!

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