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Are all H264 encoders the same?
I’m having a heck of a time encoding my 1280 x 720 DVCPro HD (P2) footage down to 480 x 270…granted I’m dividing up my 100 minute doc into 3x 35minute segments, so i can ftp them to australia but…. It takes 7 hours…sometimes it stutters, sometimes not…
I’ve tried direct from the Avid Xpress HD timeline, I’ve tried exporting a QT Reference, and an uncompressed QT to After Effects, and Quick Time Pro….
are they all the same? any advice?
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4 Replies
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Not all H.264 encoders are the same. From your message it would appear that you’ve tried both the Quicktime and Squeeze encoders.
What you can’t rely on with either of those tools is the quality and suitability of the presets that come with them.
It may take some time to find the right balance of quality, file size and time taken. Higher quality output (nearly) always takes longer and results in a larger file.
You are on the right lines, exporting as a QT ref movie and then taking that into Squeeze or whatever..
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I compress and ftp either H264 or Streambox HD clips every day, we use Final Cut, export through Quicktime and it works well. We’ve pretty much fixed on a 6mbs compression, but you need to take a nice detailed section of a clip, set in and out points and export this using different bitrates.
When you’re happy, do the whole lot. H264 compression takes a long time…
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Are there any definitive articles or tests on the different encoders? A google search didn’t provide much.
Also this specific project is for streaming in conjunction with syncVue, a multi user online video reviewing/spotting tool (used with Skype), so 6mb’s data rate might be too much.
pj -
There are actually a few hardware solutions out there for speeding up h.264 encoding, such as this one:
Plus, there are also programs that speed it up drastically, at the cost of file size – such as PQDVD or Goldfish HD (www.goldfishHD.com). Actually Goldfish HD is far better for saving file size – but not nearly as good as Squeeze.
If you really want to get a handle on compression techniques and how to alter the presets for real control – check out my new Creative Cow Master Series DVD: Internet Killed the Video Star which covers video compression and a bunch of other things as well: training.creativecow.net
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