intermediate codec

[Tim Kolb]

[clyde villegas] “1. is DV/DVCRPO NTSC codec really better than Animation?
2. is Quicktime (in DV/DVCPRO format) better than Uncompressed Windows Media format?”

1. No…not ultimately, but if you’re trying to output them at the same filesize (100 Mb/s) I suspect DVCProHD might edge ahead.

2. No…uncompessed is uncompressed and DVCProHD is aggressively compressed.

In what way are you judging the quality that this ends up being your conclusion?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Clyde Villegas]

I do not have a broadcast monitor on this editing system that I’m using at this time so I can’t really tell the difference between “DVCPro NTSC” and “Uncompressed Microsoft AVI”. (I’m just using SD DV footages). They look the same on my Acer monitor.

But with with Quicktime “DVCPro NTSC” and Quicktime “Animation,” the diffence is very apparent. There are visible noise (like colored dots) all over using the Animation codec. Are there some settings that I failed to adjust?

Going back to Uncompressed Microsoft AVI, I have two more questions:

1. What should I use for the video codec, V210 or UYVY? What’s the difference, and

2. Should I choose “Lower First” for the field type (I’m using NTSC DV raw footages shot using DVX100B at 29.97 interlaced NTSC) or leave it at “progressive”? NTSC DV’s field order is lower first so I think that’s what I should use.

Thank you very much Tim.

ut in omnibus glorificetur Deus

[Tim Kolb]

For uncompressed AVI’s I actually just use “none” as the compression. I have not had the best of luck with compatibility with “uncompressed AVI” (so apparently there is some difference between the two, but I can’t tell you what it is..)

If you’re working with DV, interlaced is always lower field first…if you prefer the look of progressive, that’s fine too, but unless you have some creative purpose for taking interlaced footage progressive, I’d probably leave it in the form it was shot in.

Animation codec…hard to say what’s going on there. I’ve not experienced what you’re describing, though I almost never use Animation codec below 95% quality.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

[Tom Flach]

I’ve also noticed the graininess of the Animation codec exported out of Adobe Media Encoder – even at 100%. Used to frequently use this as my standard intermediate codec, but it’s unusable as exported by Premiere.

Maybe someone knows of some setting to fix this? There don’t appear to be any codec options available for Animation in the Adobe Media Encoder. Have resorted to Photo JPEG as a fallback. Of course, this doesn’t help if you need an alpha channel.

[Tom Flach]

EDIT: Nevermind — pretty new to the Adobe Media Encoder and overlooked the Codec Settings area below where you choose the Video Codec. Setting those to 32 bit solved the grain problem. Obviously, the default 8 bit wasn’t going to look good.