11 minute motion video compresses to 24gig??!!!

[Daniel Low]

How are you playing this back – from a DVD player or from a PC?

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[Alex Jones]

I’m planning on delivering via DVD, then they will probably play them off of laptops connected to Plasma screens.
The motion file is so simple and basic, just a couple of fly through transitions to each stage which contain the actual video.

Should i place the .motn into FCP and compress from there?

[Daniel Low]

Alex,

We sort of covered this a bit before in your last post but…. – Without knowing the spec of the computers playing this stuff back it’s difficult to say what to use, if it’s only 11 minutes long you have the luxury of using a high data rate and frame size and it’ll still fit on a 4.7GB DVD (Not sure where ’24gig’ comes from?)

You also seem to have rather confused project settings:
1280×720
16bit depth
NTSC D!/DV Anamorphic 1.20
29.97
frame rate 29.97

The above settings don’t make sense.

What standard/resolution is the ‘actual video’? – is it that you are using NTSC 4:3 video in a 1280×720 Motion project, or……?

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[Alex Jones]

yes, I’m using standard 4:3 and also some 16:9 video footage in the motion project.
The final output needs to be viewed on a generic 42″ plasma at a tradeshow. So I’m looking to get the cleanest text and smoothest video I can without getting a crazy size. I re-compressor’ed the motion file yesterday in MPEG-2 and it came out at around 480MBs, a lot better!

What settings would you suggest for the best output on this kind of project (motion + compressor)?
Thanks again for your time, really helping me out and having me actually enjoy this experience!

[Daniel Low]

You’re not really helping me to help you. What sort of computers will be playing this video back?

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[Alex Jones]

Sorry Dan, pretty new to all this.

Okay, 2 options for playback:

– IBM Thinkpad T60’s (using the DVD player) connected to 42″ HD plasma’s
or
– DVD players connected to 42″ HD Plasma’s

So either way, they should be playing via a DVD player?
I managed to get the project onto a DVD and play it on a 42″ plasma this morning, played fine but letterboxed? I need it to stay full screen?

[Daniel Low]

Right then Al,

If you played it back directly from the T60 hard drive you could potentially encode to an HD file at 1280×720, however if you restrict yourself to DVD playback then you can it can only be at a maximum of 720×480 (16:9).

Assuming you go down the DVD route with compressor, simply choose on of the ’90 minute 16:9 (Widescreen)’ presets and that should get round rid of the letterboxing.

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Please post back saying what solved your problem. It could help others, and saying ‘thanks’ is free!

[Alex Jones]

Awesome, so simple!

Thanks again for all your help! I’ll render the file out tonight and see what i get.
I was using the anamorphic setting as I been told to use it in one of the Adobe classes I took? completely wrong?

[Daniel Low]

No, 720×480 16:9 is anamorphic. There’s loads in the compressor manual about anamorphic encoding. I’d totally recommend reading it.

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Please post back saying what solved your problem. It could help others, and saying ‘thanks’ is free!

[Alex Jones]

cool. thanks again for the help, much appreciated. Gonna go have a good read of that manual while i’m rendering my test movie. thanks again. A.