H.264 crushes the quality of vids!

[Tim Kolb]

Are you compressing directly to H264, or choosing QuickTime, then choosing the H264 codec inside those settings?

(…and are you on a Mac or Windows?)

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Valerie Tai]

I’m on Windows
I choose quicktime first with the H.264 codec.

[Tim Kolb]

Have you tried viewing the finished clips in Windows Media Player at all?…or just QT Player?

“Open with…Windows Media Player” will launch it there.

This may be one or two issues…

First QT player gamma levels just aren’t aware that they are on a PC…it’s an old old problem and it’s borderline comical that they haven’t fixed it yet.

Second, I have noticed that Media Encoder going to H264 through QT just doesn’t always work properly. QuickTime is a pretty aged media structure in any version prior to QTX, and Media Encoder CS5 is a 64 bit application…all of which may contribute to these issues.

Instead of going through QT…you might want to simply choose H264 from the options at the same level you’d choose “QuickTime” and give that a go.

Now…all that being said…I’m afraid I STILL have to use QT Pro 7.x.x (standalone application) to encode to H264 on material such as screen captures as the H264 that Media Encoder writes directly just doesn’t seem to play nice with QT Player…which is what most Mac users will play it back on.

It’s an adventure…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Valerie Tai]

Have found out it’s because I didn’t enable set bitrate. Once I put that up, the output turns out fine.
Funny though…I’ve done the same process many times before and never had to do that.