Best WEB 1080p Compression Settings?

[Craig Seeman]

Download Apple trailer. Open in Quicktime 7.6.x. Use Show Movie Inspector and look at overall bit rate.
Open Show Movie Properties and look at Video and Audio bit rate.

Encode to H.264 and use multipass or two pass depending on what application you’re using for encoding, matching the above bit rates.

Best to start with 35mm film or HDCAM SR sources because source impacts quality. Obviously you have what you have but the point is with all settings matching, your source may not be of the same quality as theirs.

Keyframe rate and b-frame distance and reference frames may depend on the source. Make sure you’re using both Natural and Forced key frames and set the key frame rate (for forced) for 5 to 10 seconds apart but some people set them for every second. If you have the ability, choose Main Profile and entropy to CABAC.

[Brian Alexander]

Here’s a good reference, although it seems that the Apple Trailer dept doesn’t seem to adhere to these guidelines.

https://www.apple.com/quicktime/tutorials/h264.html

Remember that the trailers are running 24 fps (23.98) which is only 80% of a 30 fps movie.

For instance, take a 1920 x 1080 30fps movie encoded at 8 Mbps. You could achieve the same quality by encoding a 24 fps movie @ 6.4 Mbps.

The Apple 1080 HD trailers’ average bit rates hover around 9.5 Mbps. If this were 30 fps, to achieve the same quality, you’d need to average 11.4 Mbps.

TMI? Probably.

Cheers.

—
Brian Alexander
Sr Video Engineer
Freeman AVS

[Adam Schoales]

No that’s really good.

I’m currently trying to convert an HDTV rip someone posted online in .mpg to h264 and wanted to try and use similar settings to the apple trailers.