compressing HD footage

[Andy Hawk]

Others may have better ways, but I drag the video into Mpeg streamclip and export it out as a Quicktime H.264 movie. It gets a 2Gb video down to 100-300Mb size. And plays on every machine (that I have tried) without stuttering and freezing.

http://WWW.FootageNest.com

[Maura Coleman-murray]

thanks, but I am not as worried about it being a small file as I want it to look AMAZING! I am fine with putting a 2 hour film onto a 16GB flash drive.

[Andy Hawk]

No problem 🙂
Try the H264, you might be surprised. I use H264 because it gets the best quality of picture (in my experience). My job is taking stock footage. So the quality has to be sharp and amazing.

http://WWW.FootageNest.com

[Jeff Greenberg]

The problem is play on the laptop/TV – you’re not specific enough – is it a mac? A PC? How are you playing it on a TV set? Apple TV?

Here’s ‘great’ H.264 settings. These are a bit higher than what Apple is using for Blu-Ray streams. This won’t work on a PC (it’s not an MPEG-4 container, it’s a QT container)

I can see two ways of doing this…here’s the first one (and I tested it)

Easy:
Use H.264 for DVDSP.
Average bit rate at 20
Max all the way up
Multipass.
Include PCM audio.

A bit harder
Technically? you could use QT in compressor and choose manually the H.264 codec
Make sure you set the frame size, frame rate correctly.
Then you can adjust the Data rate as high as you’d like.
Audio ought to be AAC (at 256) or PCM.

Right now the Canon 7D is shooting h.264 around 48 mb/s

Best,

Jeff G

Apple Master Trainer
Avid Cert. Instructor DS/MC
Avid & Color Videos Vasst.com
Compressor Essentials Lynda.com

[Maura Coleman-murray]

thanks guys – sorry I wasn’t more specific. The footage is from Canon 5D and 7D, shot in 24p. I am using FCP 6.0.5 and limping through compressor. I want to deliver final 1080 HD videos on a flash drive to my clients instead of blu-ray. I suppose to make it most user friendly, I should compress so the files work in both mac and PC. My thought is that they will then be able to watch their film both on their laptop/computer and also then stream it through their computer to their HDTV. I was hoping .mov files would work on both mac and pc. When I compress for DVD, I export a QT movie and then pull that into compressor. I just don’t know what settings to use on compressor to have the HD files ready to copy over to a flash drive so they can play them on their computer. I know H.264 is great, just overwhelmed with what to do in compressor.

[Alberto Anzani]

Dear guys,
I shooted a movie with DVCPRO HD 1080 1280×1080 24p with panasonic and I used in Final Cut Media Manager recompressing all in AppleProres 422 HQ 1280×720 24p for editing.

Now, for a film transfer I would like to use the native quality. So, if I do the inverse, compress the sequence from Proress 720 do Dvcpro1080, I am sure that the quality of the new Master clips will be igual with the native footage?

My question is if I have to compress (reduce) all right but if I have to put more information in the clip
enlarging the frame size, is media manager/final cut able to do really, putting back the infrmation that had discarded?

I tried with EDL, but I got problems with the media reconnect.

Could you help me? thanks a lot
alberto