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Compression for internet, how do I make small movies still look great.
Hi there. My problem is this…I am a simple animator/editor who is perpetually asked to send stuff via email, whether its tests or finished virals etc. Basically I need small files and am a little confused about the best settings to use when I render from After Effects. For instance at the moment i want to send a minute of animation 360×203 under 10 megs. The sorenson settings I am using, medium quality, keyframes every 150 frames, don’t deliver the desired file size. I don’t know much about bit rate especailly for sound. Quality is an issue too. You have probably all experienced a client who complains they can’t get the concept whatever simply because of the movie quality, (or in their infuriatingly naive way thinks that it reperesents the final image quality, “I know it looks pixalated, yes it will lokk better on TV, no Uncompressed HD footage can’t be emailed, yes I know it doesn’t look lip synced but his mouth is only one pixel big….” If someone could suggest how to do this, or where I can find information on this sort of thing in simple terms I would be greatly indebted. Thanks for your help
Peter Stenhouse -
7 Replies
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Sound can be quite heavy….especially if it is uncompressed. FOr sound I generally send 22k 8 bit mono…sounds kind of crappy, but is very light. For better compreseeions, you may want to invest in the Sorenson video3 pro codec. It features VBR, so you end up with a better looking movie that is much lighter. I use Discreet CleanerXL for all of my compressing needs. I usually send out windows media files, as most of my clients are on PC. A decent quality movie with good sound can be had for under 4mb…..very cool.
Another way to look at things is to get your hands on some ftp space. You can upload better quality clips to the ftp space, then the client can download from there. I do that with some of the larger files that I get asked for.
Mark
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Discreet’s Cleaner is a good application but whether the software is supported by Discreet is qustionable. You may want to check the COW’s Compression forum for current info regarding the software.
Should you want to make purchase for your needs and you’re on a PC, then look into Canopus’s ProCoder software which does a great job for Web Encoding of videos. It also does excellent MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 encoding (for DVD authoring) – which is a great addition to your business.
HTH
Roland Kahlenberg
broadcastGEMs customizable animated backdrops with Adobe After Effects project files -
Buy sorenson squeeze. It is easy to use and makes your video really tiny and really beautiful. Apple uses squeeze to compress all those good looking movie trailers.
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Well, rather than e-mail you might want to try some web space. I generally don’t send files more than a few megs via e-mail for the obvious reasons — either my host can’t send them, or our clients’ mailboxes can’t receive them. For us, the web has been the way to go.
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Did you try compressing it with the H.264 codec?
That usually does the trick for me. -
The problem with H.264 is that if you don’t have Quicktime 7, you can’t see it. It is about the nicest looking web video I’ve ever seen though.
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I must say that recently I’ve fallen in love with the Flash8 video codec. Amazing quality for the size of file. And it is one of the easiest workflows for posting to the web. You can download the free trial and test it out for yourself at macromedia.com
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http://www.stotion.com
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