HD animation compression for web

[Olin Padilla]

H.264 is pretty much the only web HD format. The quality is going to be affected mostly by your bitrate settings.

Also, it’s difficult to know what you mean by “trails.” If they are in fact compression artifacts, then you need a higher bitrate setting. However, since I don’t know what trails are, I assume it could also be a framerate or interlacing issue. Can you post a frame?

One last thing, when you say you “de-interlaced” the video, do you mean reverse telecine, or did you actually use a de-interlace filter? Your 16mm footage should have been telecined with a removable pull down pattern. In other words, you should be able to fix the visible interlacing without any loss of quality.

[Ben Popp]

So….for de-interlacing, I was using the filter. There’s no loss of quality imagae wise, it’s only that the slowed down footage creates “trails” and what I mean by that is you see the character move forward, but for a split second or so he remains in that same position, so it’s not a fluid movement per say, but one with a trail.

What I’ve ended up doing was using the de-interlace filter, export that out as a pro res file, then Compress that down into H.264 and using the de-interlace option under size or settings, I clicked that, so the end file is “de-interlaced” twice. Also, in regards to keyframes, this may have played an important roll, because on the H.264 compression I clicked ALL instead of automatic. This all seemed to have worked, I still notice a tiny aspect of “trails” but when I showed it to someone else they didn’t see it, maybe I’ve just been staring at it too long.

[Michael Pfost]

I wouldn’t use FCP to deinterlace, instead use Compressor. The results are much better. Also, be sure you are using ProRes files through-out your entire workflow, then use Compressor to create your h.264 file. A bitrate of 14Mbps does a great job with 1080p video, but you can probably use a much lower one for the web.