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Compression on hour and a half concert
Hello,
I’m editing a concert currently, and I had to export a cut to be sent to the band over the internet. Its an hour and a half long, and the export I made was an 720P H.264 at a data rate of 5000kbps. This made the file 3.5 gigs or so. My boss was disappointed with the quality of the export, but I can’t seem to get something that feels high quality without making the file way to big to send over the internet. When I use the generic h.264 setting in compressor it looks great, but is 40+gigs. This is consistant with my experience in compression, but he seems disappointed in the results. Am I missing something here? I’ve exported versions with Compressor, Final Cut Pro, Autodesk Cleaner, MPEG Streamclip, and Episode Pro. I’ve experimented with lots of settings, and can’t seem to crack this.I’m not one who handles disappointing people well, but are these expectations reasonable? I don’t think the file looks bad for its datarate and aspect ratio, but of course the client needs to be happy. I just need to know I’ve done everything I can.
If you were going to encode a video file for an entire concert to be sent online @ 720p, what would your settings be?
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3 Replies
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[Danny O'Malley] “720P H.264 at a data rate of 5000kbps.”
[Danny O'Malley] “If you were going to encode a video file for an entire concert to be sent online @ 720p, what would your settings be?”Generally those would be close to the settings I’d use. Keep in mind that the content can make a difference as some things don’t hold up as well when compressed at a given target as others. Not seeing the source vs the compressed version it’s hard to judge. If the source has noise the compressed version will likely have more noise for example. One might try bringing down blacks or using a good denoise filter (and there are bad filters which simply soften the image).
Apple’s H.264 is not very good and neither are Compressor’s filters. Generally I’d prefer to use Telestream Episode which used Dicas and now uses Main Concept’s H.264 and has very good processing filters.
If your encode is getting a negative critique, ideally the critic should be able to articulate what they don’t like. That can give you clues regarding any settings changes and/or the use of processing filters before being put into the position of simply increasing the data rate.
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I’m also running into this problem with hour plus concert videos. I’m using Compressor to encode H.264 vids with Matrox MAX H.264 acceleration which is really nice on these long running times…but…the file size is huge, even with my SD video.
I’m not familiar with the other compression schemes that are mentioned here – how do these file sizes compare?
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File size is dependent on data rate. It seems like it would be basic since if you have “X” kbps (kilobits per second) then you know how many kb you have for minutes or hours. Lower kbps to lower the file size and, unfortunately, the quality. It’s the fundamental nature of compression.
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