Best compression for long HD film?

[Juan Manuel]

Use H264 with the bitrate required to get that filesize. About software, if you have the Adobe suite, you can use Adobe Media Encoder to encode it

[Jeff Greenberg]

You don’t want it 800mb. You want it as large as it needs to be for the inevitable recompression that vimeo will do.

Why don’t you fix Compressor instead of trying to find a workaround. It has a youtube preset that’s perfect for this use.

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
My book (with Richard Harrington and Robbie Carman)- An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro
Lynda.com – Compressor Essentials 3.5 and 4
Contact me through my Website

[Mia Maffioli]

Hello and thanks

What do you mean by”as large as it needs to be for the inevitable recompression that vimeo will do” ?
The uncompressed file is huge, like 13GB- it’s a 70 mins long video!
And I also try to keep the size under 1GB because it then takes a long long time to upload.

Thanks

M

[Jeff Greenberg]

[Mia Maffioli] ” What do you mean by”as large as it needs to be for the inevitable recompression that vimeo will do” ?”

Well, the major online sites will recompress your video; you want to give them a ‘better’ version to compress from (therefore, the less compressed it is the better.) So, the apple preset for Youtube will result in a large file – still significantly smaller than the hiqher qualityn original from your editorial software.

[Mia Maffioli] ” The uncompressed file is huge, like 13GB- it’s a 70 mins long video!”
That’s not uncompressed. A 70 min uncompressed HD video would be around 400GB. My guess is that you’re using one of these formats: HDV, XDCam, ProRes Proxy.

You’ll get about the file down to around 3-4 gig using the Apple preset (which runs on compressor 3.5 around 8mb/s). Yup, it’ll be a longer upload, but that’s about as small as you want it to get; below that threshold it really affects the quality of the footage.

[Mia Maffioli] “And I also try to keep the size under 1GB because it then takes a long long time to upload.”

I understand – one possibility is to downconvert a 1080 video to 960×540 – still larger than HD, and you’ll get the file size down as well.

Best,

Jeff G

Certified Master Trainer | Adobe, Apple, Avid
————
You should follow me (filmgeek) on twitter. I promise to be nice.
My book (with Richard Harrington and Robbie Carman)- An Editor’s Guide to Adobe Premiere Pro
Lynda.com – Compressor Essentials 3.5 and 4
Contact me through my Website

[Mia Maffioli]

Thanks Jeff for your time in answering.

Still, I am to find the solution.

Vimeo Plus gives a weekly upload of 5Gb.
That means if I upload a 3-4 Gb cut I can only upload 1 a cut a week.
Plus, a 3-4 Gb upload is immensly long, by any standard.

On those ILLEGAL SITES THAT I WOULD NEVER USE a whole feature film to download illegally (up to 2hrs) is compressed to- what 500 to 800Mb- Ok, not HD- sometimes to a high standard. For a feature length film.

My cut is 70mins- there MUST be a decent compression that would keep it HD and under, say 1GB.

Hoping for the definitive answer (and thanks so far for the help)…

[Jeff Greenberg]

[Mia Maffioli] “Vimeo Plus gives a weekly upload of 5Gb.
That means if I upload a 3-4 Gb cut I can only upload 1 a cut a week.
Plus, a 3-4 Gb upload is immensly long, by any standard.”

3-4 GB isn’t that large. You may not like hearing that. I routinely push 10-20 GB.

One alternative, is that you could pay for the upload.

Want a cheap solution? If you’re willing to verify with youtube via a text message, you’re allowed to upload files >15 min for free. Here’s the link.

[Mia Maffioli] ” On those ILLEGAL SITES THAT I WOULD NEVER USE a whole feature film to download illegally (up to 2hrs) is compressed to- what 500 to 800Mb- Ok, not HD- sometimes to a high standard. For a feature length film.”

No comment here beyond, that’s for an SD rip. HD is 4-6x that size (in pixels)…meaning 800×4=3.2 Gigs. They’re also running at 24fps which means a 20% smaller file.

By the way, I’m not just guessing here – Vimeo gives you some baseline suggestions:
https://vimeo.com/help/compression

At 5mb/s (their suggestion for HD, not mine) your 70 min piece comes out to 2.5 gig.

[Mia Maffioli] ” My cut is 70mins- there MUST be a decent compression that would keep it HD and under, say 1GB.”

Why would you think that? At some threshold compression size, your video will look heavily compressed.

You want a 1GB file? I can tell you exactly how to get a 1 gig file. You can compress in h.264 (pick whatever encoder you like – compressor, ffmpeg, squeeze, episode) and set it to about 2mb/s. You’ll get a 1GB file. The quality, on the other hand, will be lacking.

[Juan Manuel]

Mia, relax. As far as I understand, we aren’t talking about the final delivery for your client but rather a preview, right? If that’s the case, you don’t need top notch quality but rather something that looks nice. So make a 1GB file – h264 is your best friend here – and upload it to whatever website fits you best. It can be Vimeo, or it can be any cloud service.
And, once the job is done, you’ll give it to your client in whatever media you have arranged.