How to get a video of This Quality .mp4?

[Kevin Camp]

if the destination is streaming on the web, you should probably work with a square pixel comp, like 640×480, or 720×540 (or the newish adobe square px equivalents for sd, which i haven’t memorized yet).

then render at as high of quality as possible, like uncompressed or lossless animation. take that huge file to a compression utility, like adobe’s media encoder, or mpeg-streamclip (it’s free and multiplatform), or similar to make a mp4. essentially any compressor that can do a multipass encode for mp4 should do a good job.

with mpeg-streamclip, i would just import the lossless file, and choose file>export>mp4. choose h.264 for the compressor, aac for audio, set the quality as desired (try the highest and see where that gets you, or if you have a target bandwidth, enter that). and enable the options for multipass and b-frames.

you might also inquire on in the compression forum….

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Stephen Holmes]

Thanks Kevin, much appreciated.

As it was rendering from AE, I thought I should ask here.

Next time I will make sure my comp is as you suggested, then I will get the best quality right? Do you think the creator of the Kajabi video would have used the same settings, even for a video that large dimensionally?

What I’m asking is, would I keep the quality even if I scaled the video up to the same size?

Sorry for being a pain, just want to get it right without any hiccups and your help is invaluable.

Cheers,
Steve

[Kevin Camp]

[stephen holmes] “What I’m asking is, would I keep the quality even if I scaled the video up to the same size?”

if the elements in your comp are raster (video footage, raster images, jpegs, tiffs, etc) and they are at 100% scale in your comp, then scaling them up will degrade the image quality… as scaling a 100×100 image up to 200×200 would in photoshop…

however if the elements in the comp are all created in ae as masks, shapes or text, or are vector art and the ‘continuous rasterization’ option is enabled for those layers, then you could take your current comp, drop it into a new, larger comp, scale it up to fit the new frame size and not lose any image quality.

you’d then render that larger comp to lossless animation (or other high quality codec) and take that render to a compression utility for h.264 compression, and you should get good results.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Michael Szalapski]

AE cannot do multipass encoding. Multipass encoding makes better looking videos in smaller file sizes when using MPEG compression such as h.264.
This was so common a question that Dave LaRonde made a “stock answer” for it.

Dave’s Stock Answer #3:

Don’t use AE to compress files for final delivery. The various compressors are there only to make quick ‘n dirty files showing a project’s progress to producers, clients, the kids, etc. AE is incapable of doing multipass encoding, a crucial feature that greatly improves the image quality of H.264 and MPEG-type files in particular.

Render a high-quality file from AE, and use a different application to do the compression. Popular ones are Adobe Media Encoder, Sorenson Squeeze and Apple’s Compressor, which comes bundled with Final Cut Suite. Even compressing in Quicktime Pro is better than compressing in AE.

Making good-looking compressed files is almost as much an art as it is a science. It is NOT straightforward at all. I recommend asking a few questions at the COW’s Compression Techniques forum.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.