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Activity Forums Compression Techniques 1920×1080 compression settings for desktop playback

  • 1920×1080 compression settings for desktop playback

    Posted by First Last on November 12, 2010 at 7:03 pm

    I tried searching around for an answer to this but haven’t been able to find anything.

    I’m trying to compress a 20min 1920×1080 video clip that will be used as a looping display and played off a mac mini (2.66Ghz, 2GB ram). I rendered out a Apple Pro Res (1920×1080, 30p, 48Khz) Quicktime from FCP, which looked pretty good, but there were some minor glitches which I’m guessing are from the computer trying to playback the video. After that, I rendered out a H264 with a data rate of 8000 and it looked horrible. Then, I rendered out a DVCPROHD 1080p30 quicktime form FCP but when I dropped it onto the Mac Mini it wasn’t able to read it (codec issue).

    Anyone have any suggestions as to what would be the best compression settings for a HD video (1920×1080) that’ll be played back with Quicktime on a Mac Mini?

    Thanks.

    Go fly fishing.

    Daniel Low replied 15 years, 6 months ago 4 Members · 4 Replies
  • 4 Replies
  • Jason Brown

    November 12, 2010 at 8:05 pm

    I’m surprised that h264 @ 8Mbps looked horrible. Granted, thats the same bitrate that SD DVD usually runs at, but I routinely work in 8-12 Mbps and they look completely fine. I’d be more interested in how you “exported” that file?

    Did you try to up the bitrate to something closer to Blu-ray numbers? 12-20Mbps?

  • First Last

    November 12, 2010 at 9:23 pm

    Exported from FCP…

    Quicktime conversion…
    H264
    Frame Rate: Current
    Key Frame: All
    Limit Data Rate: 8000
    Size: 1920×1080
    Render: Better

    Sound: ACC…

    Tried 12000, and it definetly looked better, but still had grain in the dark areas. Would something like 15000 still play without glitches?

    Go fly fishing.

  • Chris Blair

    November 13, 2010 at 12:00 am

    Not sure if it’s an option, but we use Cineform codecs for HD stuff and they’ll play on almost anything. The codecs are a little pricey but they’re worth it if you need really small file sizes and virtually transparent compression. I literally can’t tell the difference between an uncompressed HD file and a cineform compressed one that’s less than a tenth the size…and that’s in scenes with animated gradients and heavy graphics, which usually suffer quite a bit.

    I’m surprised ProRes won’t play smoothly as it’s a similar codec in terms of how it compresses and is decoded.

    Chris Blair
    Magnetic Image, Inc.
    Evansville, IN
    http://www.videomi.com
    Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog

  • Daniel Low

    November 14, 2010 at 10:41 pm

    Do not use Export to Quicktime. Use compressor.

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