-
Apple Compressor – help setting h.264 settings?
Hi Everyone,
So I’ve been playing around with compressor and been trying to find ideal settings, specifically for uploading to the web.
Normally my go to settings is just the “iPod/iPhone” setting but a friend suggested I try the h.264 codecs.
I tried two, the LAN setting and another that I think was just labeled h.264 I cannot remember (not that it matters since it was a huge file, of nearly 500 megs where as the lan one was 174 megs and just about as good).
Essentially I’m trying to get stuff that will upload/look nice on Vimeo and is more or less equal to the apple 480p trailers you can download.
Now that h.264 lan setting more or less gave me what I wanted, but the problem was it wasn’t in 16×9 like my footage (from a 16×9 final cut project). The iPod/iPhone/iTV/DVD settings all read the 16×9 flag, but this setting doesn’t, nor does it do a very good job of de-interlacing.
So I’m just curious as to how I should customize these settings to fix these two small issues.
Cheers!
-
5 Replies
-
The easiest thing to do is read the manual. It will tell you how you select the preset, click on the + sign (the right button of the 3 at the top left of the preset tab) which will duplicate the setting, and allow you to modify the preset. Double click on the duplicate preset to open it, go to the 5th button (Geometry) from the left (at the top of the preset) and chenge the frame size. The 3rd button from the right (Frame Controls) is what you want to use to de-interlace, not the standard de-interlace filter). I won’t go into those details, but do a search of this forum (De-interlace Frame Controls) and you’ll find tons of advice.
Ed -
Okay so is just the “quick deinterlace” going to work fine?
As for frame size, should I just use the “16×9” setting, or is there a better (custom) setting to use?
Thanks for the quick response.
-
Here’s the answer (from a search!)
In Frame Controls:
>>>Select Custom as the Frame Controls
(default is Off). Select Best for Resize Filter, Progressive as Output Fields, and Best as Deinterlace. Also select Best as Rate Conversion at bottom (not sure if that’s necessary, but what the hell). One of those 6 buttons at the top of the Inspector is Filters, and one option there is De-interlace,
DON’T use that one, it’s crap, and you’ve already selected all the de-interlacing you need. <<< Ed -
I would suggest that you de-interlace using an intermediate codec; either AIC or ProRes. I use ProRes because it has better color compression than AIC (4:2:2 vs 4:2:0).
h.264 is an awesome codec but it does use a lot of processing power when compressing video. A multi-pass h.264 will apply de-interlacing on each pass (up to 5 or 6 passes) whereas using ProRes is near real time; a single pass – much much faster. You can then use your new de-interlaced ProRes file to create your h.264. This will speed up your work-flow a great deal.
As far as your 16:9 issue goes, you should take care of this at the same time you de-interlace with the ProRes conversion. In your geometry settings set your intended output size and change your pixel aspect ratio to square. Again, any resizing should be done with ProRes because h.264 will take forever to do this.
Stay away from the de-interlace filter like Ed said; just make sure you de-interlace by turning your Frame Controls on and your output field set to Progressive.
Bookmark this link for future reference:
https://www.apple.com/quicktime/tutorials/h264.htmlHope this helps.
-
So where do I do this first re-encode for pro-res? should I do this using compressor or final cut or something? Again I’m still very new to this (usually I just used something like visual hub to re-encode my videos for the iPod) so I need a little more help than others…
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up