2k cinema playback from Powerbook to projector

Compression Techniques

2k cinema playback from Powerbook to projector

Posted by Tom Ackroyd on November 26, 2005 at 7:40 am

I have a 30sec cinema spot sitting on my G5 as an uncompressed quicktime at 2k resolution. (In fact it’s a 1:2.35 ratio spot at 1828×777 pixels.)

I’d like to play this from a recent decent Powerbook through a data projector at highest possible resolution with no dropped frames.

Can anyone advise best compression for this? I guess I’ll need to shrink the picture size – at the moment I don’t know the maximum resolution our projectors can take, and also do not know native res of the biggest screen Powerbooks.

So really my main question really is what is a good datarate to aim for?

Sorry for the lack of knowledge and unknowns in this – I am investigating MJPEG but would appreciate any comments. I’ve never worked at this size before.

Thanks in advance,
Tom Ackroyd

Tom Ackroyd replied 20 years, 5 months ago 2 Members · 4 Replies
4 Replies

Tom Ackroyd
November 26, 2005 at 7:41 am

I should mention that I don’t have QuickTime 7 and so cannot use H.264.

Cheers,
Tom
Ben Waggoner
December 10, 2005 at 7:46 pm

Your best bet might be MPEG-2 playing out via FLC 0.8.4. However the G4 processor in PowerBooks today are pretty anemic for HD playback. Could you use a Wintel box, or maybe DVI out of a iMac G5 17″?
Tom Ackroyd
December 11, 2005 at 9:23 pm

Thanks Ben.

Wintel playback not really an option.

Could you explain exactly what FLC is?

If I’m playing back MPEG-2 I would presumably need the QuickTime MPEG-2 component installed?

I’ve had some success with mpeg-4, but am certain quality could be improved.

Your iMac suggestion is good – would you recommend H.264 for this if MPEG-2 isn’t an option?

Sorry for all the new questions!

Cheers,
Tom Ackroyd
Tom Ackroyd
December 13, 2005 at 8:51 pm

It’s all over. And for those that are ineterested:

I did the playout yesterday from a G4 Powerbook, QuickTime 7, to a data projector via RGB not DVI. Projector res was only 1024 wide – this is what I set the Powerbook res to.

The codec I ended up using was (fanfare) Sorenson3 (not Pro, just the one that comes with QuickTime) using Compression Master; datarate disabled, Sorenson setting “high”, (maximum quality caused dropped frames.) I had prepped a 1280×544 uncompressed version of the spot, having downsized the original 1920×777 tiff sequence in Photoshop, and got the codec to do the shrink to 1024 wide – an odd workflow I know but ran out of time…

I had already tried H264 but Sorenson was just way better. Maybe it’s down to datarate I don’t know.

So, the compromises were:
Not 2K
Not DVI
Old projector

But results still good and it demo’d the spot reasonably well.

Off to the cinema now to see it in real life.

Ben – still keen to know about FLC…

Cheers,
Tom Ackroyd

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