-
Amazing compression for HD? Has anyone else used this?
Recently a colleague and I stumbled across a technique for high quality compression that we have yet to find a downside for.
(Especially for HD output in After Effects) we use the following:
1. Quicktime
2. (under settings) use the ANIMATION setting and then set the quality slider down to about 65.This gives us anywhere from 5 to 20 times smaller file sizes than uncompressed AVI or uncompressed .MOV, and it even results in incredibly small file sizes when using RGB+ALPHA. In fact, some of our alpha channeled footage was smaller than regular RGB only footage. This can be used even with the “Lossless with alpha” preset…just go under the settings and change to animation and use the quality slider.
We did some comparisons, by outputting and then placing the footage up against the original and scaling both up to 400% with no VISUAL loss of quality (I’m sure scopes would reveal some weakness, though)
This could be a real space saver for those of us dealing with the horrible burden of trying to archive large amounts of HD data.
-
2 Replies
-
you can test you loss by layering the original footage and the rendered footage in the same comp, then set the upper footage layer’s blending mode to difference. pixels that are least altered will look dark, pixels that are the most altered look lighter (often in various colors).
you can also measure the change by adding an adjustment layer over the top of the two footage layers and add the levels effect. the amount of change will be evident in the histogram.
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
I wouldn’t recommend anything other than full quality for archived footage.
You never know when you’ll need to use some of that footage again, and the better the quality, the better the results (particularly if additional effects/compositing is required).
Remember, once you’ve thrown away some of the quality (which, in digital video, means data), you can’t get it back.
Large capacity hard drives are cheap, these days, so archiving large files shouldn’t really be that much of an issue.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up