HD editing in AVID

[Rhewitt]

Firstly, you cannot compress the file without losing quality if you want to reduce the file size.

For web use your only real options are Quicktime, Flash or Windows Media.

The web as it stands is not capable of supporting a HD stream unless everyone has fibre to the home and infinite bandwidth. The only real option is to allow folks to download the file and playback when loaded.

[Richard Sanchez]

Unfortunately, quality loss is inherent with compression and there’s really no way around that, but using Sorenson Squeeze (which should have been bundled with your Avid application) you can get some pretty clean results. If you’re looking to put it up on you tube, compressing it down to 320 x 180 will do you the best. If it’s going up on something different, you can spit it out at a higher resolution but that will increase file size and bandwidth requirement. I usually set it to Sorenson AVC Pro codec on multi pass, and a data rate of about 762 to get some nice clean results.

To get it into Sorenson, use the “Send To” feature under the file tab if your application, then move the cursor to “encoding” and then “sorenson squeeze” or you can do it manually with a quicktime reference file.

Check out the forum for compression techniques, there’s tons of great stuff in there.

[Grinner Hester]

man, when you find out how to compress without losing quality, let us know! 😉
I use the HD presets for wmv files in squeeze. They work pretty good for approval purposes.

[Joe Womble]

I’ve been using both the .wmv and .mov HD presets in Squeeze. On a show in Orlando, I loaded the former into a Grass Valley Turbo for playback on two 12′ X 16′ screens. Looked great.

Regards,

Joe Womble

[Rhewitt]

Have you seen DNxHD-36 in action? Stunning image quality with massive compression. It was used during the shooting and editing of Lord of the Rings.