• Compression Techniques

  Best Compression to use when footage will be recompressed

  Posted by Scott Towers on March 9, 2011 at 1:47 am

  My Canon xh-a1 was used to record a musical and I was given the tapes to upload, which I did into final cut. However, I am not the person editing the footage. I need to get this footage to the person who is editing it.

  It is about 2 hours of HD footage and it is around 35 gigs. What would be the best way to get this to the person who needs it without using an FTP or putting it on an external hard drive?

  I was going to put the footage on a few dvds and I did not know if there was a safe compression that I could use that would not reduce the quality of the footage. He would then rip the files off the dvd and use those to edit. He would most likely compress a second time once it was edited.

  I was also considering recapturing the footage in SD and perhaps the files would be small enough that I would not need to compress them.

  Which would work best? Any suggestions or other ideas would be excellent.

  Thanks!

  Scott Towers replied 15 years, 6 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Craig Seeman

  March 9, 2011 at 3:16 am

  HD and SD are formats, not codecs, and in and of themselves do not determine file size.
  HDV is 25mbps, DV is 25mbps for example. Same file size.

  There is no “safe” compression. Compression will through out data and impact quality. It may not be obvious on the first pass but will much more likely show itself when recompressed.

  You don’t mention at all the final use of the video and you have to factor this in. You don’t mention at all the limitations the person you’re delivering this too has. Why avoid hard drives? FTP is probably out of the question without mercilessly crushing the files so I’m not even sure why you mention this comparatively.

  Deliver on Hard drives. Have them buy a Blu-ray disc drive and deliver the files (not encoded) on Blu-ray discs which can hold close to 25GB single sided.
• 

  Scott Towers

  March 9, 2011 at 3:58 am

  I am delivering this via USPS and want to deliver it least expensive way possible as I am not being compensated for my efforts. If I were to send a hard drive I’d have to buy a hard drive and then pay to have it shipped.

  I do not have a blu-ray burner, so having both of us go out and buy one is not really an option either.

  The final product will be made into a dvd and distributed to the people who purchased it.

  I don’t know what the limitations are of the person getting the files. I don’t even know what he is editing with. The only things I know is that he is in high school, he was going to record the play with a small consumer hard drive camera, and that he did not have a deck that could upload HDV tapes.

  I understand that any type of compression will alter the quality of the video, my question was…is there a compression that I could use that would shrink the file size slightly and not affect the quality as much so that it could eventually be compressed to a 720×480 mpeg2 to be put on a dvd?

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