Compressing large file for web

Compression Techniques

Compressing large file for web

Posted by Joni Church on March 11, 2010 at 4:31 pm

HI there,

I have a 9 minute, 68 GB file that I need to compress for the web (under 50MB is the goal). It’s native format is 1920×1080, Uncompressed 8-bit.

I ran the file through cleaner and created a good-looking, 30 MB .wmv (640 x 360), but I need to get a comparable .mov file at the same frame size.

The QT .mov I encoded in Cleaner came out at 475 MB, which is obviously too large. I know if I lower all the quality settings I can reduce the file size, but I haven’t been able to get anything that looks comparable to the quality of the .wmv.

Does anyone have any tips or setting to suggest? I used;

H.264
640×360
Millions of colours
16-bit
44.100
29.97 fps
Data rate: 300 kbps

Thanks for any help!

Joni Church replied 16 years, 2 months ago 2 Members · 4 Replies
4 Replies

Craig Seeman
March 11, 2010 at 4:47 pm

Data rate is the biggest impact on size. You could use the same data rate you used for the WMV and you would get a file reasonably close to the same size (there is some variance).

Personally you should replaced Cleaner immediately especially if you’re on a Mac. It only creates WMV7 which is far less efficient and/or poorer quality than WMV9. It’s incredibly slow, hasn’t even received a bug fix in 2 years. I can’t imagine how it can possibly handle H.264 .mov encoding well compared to well maintained encoders such as Telestream Episode or Sorenson Squeeze.
Joni Church
March 11, 2010 at 4:58 pm

Thanks, Craig.

Funny thing, I set the data rate to 300 kbps on the H.264 as well, but the file size was still huge. I wonder if there’s a glitch in Cleaner on that setting somehow, because I checked the file properties in QT just now and it says the data rate is 7,847.03 kbit/s.

I seldom do work like this since I’m a film/TV editor and don’t often have cause to upload such large files to the web (not needing them to look good, anyway).

I’ll double-check the data rate and do another test. Thanks for the tip on the other apps, I had a feeling Cleaner was outdated.

Thanks again for your help,
Joni
Craig Seeman
March 11, 2010 at 5:06 pm

[Joni Church] “I seldom do work like this since I’m a film/TV editor and don’t often have cause to upload such large files to the web (not needing them to look good, anyway). “

Client screeners? I’ve had to do that quite a bit. In my experience somebody always seems to want to view the latest cut at home or on the road.

[Joni Church] “I had a feeling Cleaner was outdated. “
It may be that it can’t properly communicated with current versions of Quicktime. Autodesk has left it for dead. Even the 6.5 to 6.5.1 update about 2 years ago was minor. The update from 6 to 6.5 really wasn’t much of an update either.
Joni Church
March 11, 2010 at 5:12 pm

Client screeners; for sure, but when I’m posting them to the web they can usually be a little smaller than 640 and pristine quality isn’t an issue. I also usually end up doing individual scenes so the files aren’t as big. I’ve been lucky so far in not having to post full cuts online for anyone.

That’s an interesting thought about Cleaner not communicating well with QT. I’ve got version 6 and it does seem archaic, but it’s served me fine so far. Looks like an upgrade to something else would be a good move.

I’ll post back once I get in to the other suite and test it out again.

Thanks.

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