Discreet cleaner 6 does it support HDV? Help me compress

[Craig Seeman]

Cleaner 6 or 6.5? 6 is a few years old and predates HDV. 6.5 might work but I haven’t tried it with HDV.
Have you tried using Compressor 2? Since FCP can handle HDV I would suspect Compressor 2 can also. Compressor doesn’t do 2 pass VBR Sorenson Pro though (I wouldn’t use Sorenson standard at all . . . yuch!). Compressor does very nice H.264 which might do your HDV source justice. The alternative might be to use Sorenson Squeeze 4.3 since it includes Sorenson Pro and does good MPEG4 (better than Compressor IMHO).

[Ryanservant]

I am woried that the end user is not the type to be updating the quicktime on thier…mostly PC’s….What about the HDV to WMV 9 workflow….have you had success with that using flip for mac with HDV?

Ryan

G5
xserve 2.5 TB
FCP HD
2 gigs ram
Used to be Kona Hd…Now its Decklink HD pro

Ryan Servant
AirSeaLand Productions
http://www.airsealand.com
718-626-2646

[Craig Seeman]

HDV to WMV with Flip4Mac works fine. Key to remember is that HDV is already heavily compressed compared to HDCAM so I’d test a section with dissolves for example to see how the transitions hold up. If you’re editing in HDV, those dissolves are more or less like rendering a “fast action” sequence in HDV and we know how HDV loves fast action.

[Ryanservant]

This isn’t really an edit per se. It will be a whole high school game, start to finish. I was going to go with the firstore FS-4 to help me in elimating 500 hours of capture time, I am shooting a lot of high school games….but now I just found out that firestore and FCP don’t really mesh yet. The firestore is going to give me a .m2t file. Is there a way to convert this .m2t file into a nice looking web file?

Ryan

G5
xserve 2.5 TB
FCP HD
2 gigs ram
Used to be Kona Hd…Now its Decklink HD pro

Ryan Servant
AirSeaLand Productions
http://www.airsealand.com
718-626-2646

[Charles Simonson]

For your web rates at 320×240, I would say you could get the following encoded data rates and still be very pleased with the outcome: H.264 Main Profile = 325kbps; WMV9 Advanced Profile = 450kbps; MPEG-4 Part 2 Simple Profile = 650kbps. For H.264, you have about 75kbps lower that you can go before quality really starts to get ugly; for WMV, you have about 125kbps; for MPEG-4, about 100kbps. Also, around these rates and considering it is for the web, I would seriously give thought to halving the frame rate of the encode. There could be great encoding benefit in going from 60 or 30 fps to 15fps or from 24fps to 12fps.

[Charles Simonson]

MPEG StreamClip should be your defacto tool for this. I wouldn’t necessarily use it to compress with, but it is great for converting HD MPEGs with to more suitable and friendly QT editing formats. Also, there is DiVA from the 3ivx folks which works very well and is incredibly fast.

[Craig Seeman]

It’s an aesthetic choice but I’m not a fan of cutting the frame rate. Ryan is doing sports and shooting on HDV. I’m not sure I’d want to show an action sport like footbal at 15fps unless he suspects people will have PCs that will be “stressed” on the decode side. I also think H.264 (needs QT7) and WMV 9 Advanced Profile (does not work with WMP9 on Macs I believe nor with Flip4Mac yet) may hurt broad reach if that’s his intent (although they do look very nice).

[Charles Simonson]

At the bit rates, size, overall length of the video he is shooting for, and the fact that this is for web distribution, halving the frame rate is a suitable option, even for sports IMO. Of course, he doesn’t need to use H.264 or WMV9 AP, but then he will need to almost double his target bit rate for other formats. Obviously its a tradeoff between quality and compatibility. And halving the frame rate could benefit in two ways; one method would be to apply the same total bits to less numbers of frames, resulting in better quality; the other method would be to apply the same rate of bits to less numbers of frames, resulting in the same quality with half the final file size. Also, it is here where using an intelligent encoder that can produce a variable frame rate at half the source (rather than a fixed-hard number frame rate from the source) would be more beneficial for the eye.

When you’re talking about progressive downloading of a 500MB file, other options that you wouldn’t normally consider should be taken into account to get that file as small as possible. As a user, when viewing something at 320×240 (on a computer inside a web browser; if this whole project is for iPod or something, then that would be different and I wouldn’t change the fps), I would care less about whether the fps is full or half the original, and a whole lot more on whether the file is 250MB or 500MB. Particularly, being a sport video, it would be very important to me to be able to scroll around the video as soon as possible, as I am sure there is plenty that went on in the game that the average viewer won’t care about. Most will only likely care about their son’s tackle or touchdown reception. 250MB sure does download a lot quicker than 500MB.

[Craig Seeman]

Very intersting points Charles.

H.264 is great when it comes to quality vs data rate and file size but needs QT7 (just restating since I think we’re in agreement here).
I’m a little less convinced regarding WMV9 AP though. Do you really find a significant difference between WMV9 “standard” (main) and WMV9 AP in quality vs data rate and file size? If so can you subjectively quantify as you’ve done with the above codec?

“Intelligent Encoder” capable of variable frame rate. Haven’t seen that in software on the Mac side? Anybody doing this in software at all? This could resolve many issues regarding frame rate used.

File size is a major factor as you point out in progressive download. I would think one would break it up into smaller chuncks though. For football it could be Quarters (might still be large) or down series which would really give the user flexibility and smaller file sizes.

I also don’t think cutting the frame rate in half cuts the file size in half. The encoder may have to do “more work” since the change in movement from frame to frame is now greater (especially for sports). Actually this is why the “intelligent encoder” could be significant. In sports like football there are moments where there is actually little motion (huddles, time at line of scrimmage for example).

[Ryanservant]

Do you know how happy I am that you guys are helping me out with this…..Ok so the cleaner download I tried doesnt like HDv…the sorenson squeeze demo i just download likes it as an input but after it compresses it I get a blank file. I tried WMV and quicktime. The end user is going to be college coaches watching the videos for recruiting purposes….if it was for mom and pop I would prob lower the frame rate…..i really need as high of quality as possible…doesnt everyone say that? They will be viewing on the browser and not on any portable devices. I think I am going to buy 3 of the quad G5’s to speed up whatever process I am going to pick to help out in export time. I will be dealling with 1000 games at 30 min each. The web site devolpment company doesnt know much about video at all….the demo that they showed the client of a video on the website was done by an animator bringing in a video file to flash. We had nothing to do with the project when this happened and I have no details about that. I am trying to find out if they intend to bring all 1000 files into flash or If I will be encoding the finished file myself…if they want their animator to compress it with flash I am going to send him huge files on external drives and let him deal with it. I am worried it won’t be that easy…it never is….So I know that from FCP I can export a WMV from my HDV sequence. I just don’t know what will happen to the end user if the file is huge….will they be starring at a blank screen for 10 minutes as it loads up???

G5
xserve 2.5 TB
FCP HD
2 gigs ram
Used to be Kona Hd…Now its Decklink HD pro

Ryan Servant
AirSeaLand Productions
http://www.airsealand.com
718-626-2646