keep big video files small

[David Johnson]

Personally, I use external Firewire/USB drives for exactly that purpose. They’re getting cheaper with larger capacities every day…I have several 160Gb 1394/USB drives that I paid about $150 each for and a couple card deck size 20Gb USB drives that I paid about $200 for (the convenience of the small physical size ups the price). I often get clients to buy their own so they also have uncompressed archives/backups of their projects and/or media. If you’re going between Windows & Macs, watch out for formatting issues…they’re manageable, but harder to manage when they get you by surprise.

[Steve Roberts]

Yep — portable drives are used for that purpose all the time.

Hoo boy though … don’t get me started on cross-platform drive work. I just did a bunch of file transfer between OSX and NTFS/FAT32 drives. Let’s see what I remember:

OSX can’t write to NTFS-formatted portable drives.
OSX can’t write files bigger than 4GB to FAT32-formatted portable drives.
The Windows box could only read files in the Drop Box on the Mac. If ther’s a workaround, I’d love to hear it.
Firewire was much faster than USB. Not sure about FW 800, USB 2.

Anybody else?
Steve

[David Johnson]

I do cross-platform a lot myself and what Steve described are indeed the main issues. Not sure what you mean by “The Windows box could only read files in the Drop Box on the Mac.” I’m more of a Windows guy so it’s probably that I don’t know what the Mac “Drop Box” is. I have a Mac and PC connected to a fairly beefy network so I get around the Mac writing to NTFS & FAT32 limit problems by transferring Mac files to the PC over the network, then to an NTFS drive. Still an extra step, but not nearly as bad as cross-platform work use to be. And, I heard that Macs will soon be able to read & write to NTFS.
“Firewire was much faster than USB”
Yep, but I’ve yet to find a reasonably priced FW drive as small in size and big in capacity as my USB2 drives. FW 800 is definitely way faster than all the above, but it probabaly won’t be on most computers for a while, which defeats the advantage of external drives…to be able to take stuff anywhere.

[Mike Strasser]

Ok. I see.
But if a customer is far away… Do you send the portable drive by mail?
Respectively which format and compression would you use for a transfer via DVD?

mike

[Steve Roberts]

Have the client pay for a courier. Then you can track it (with a tracking number) and insure it. FedEx was used to courier the animation drawings for Roger Rabbit acrosss continents. So there!

Now if you’re talking about a data DVD, the client could compress the files to the Animation codec or Photo-JPEG at 89% or 94%. Digital Anarchy’s Microcosm codec is another option, but the client might not be into buying a codec.

All those formats are Quicktime movies.

Steve

[Mike Strasser]

I know photo jpg codec.
Can AE and Premiere handle it without slowing the machine down?
Or do I have to convert it again?

Is there another good codec for dvd that makes no codec installation necessary?
In my case 40 minutes of video shoul fit on 1 or 2 dvds a 4,7 GB.

thanks mike

[Steve Roberts]

“Can AE and Premiere handle it without slowing the machine down?”

Not sure what you mean by “slowing it down”. Slowing which process down? Photo-JPEG is commonly used for stock footage, so it’s often brought into AE and non-linear editors in that format. However, if your non-linear editor’s timeline is not set to Photo-JPEG, yes, your editor will have to render each Photo-JPEG frame, and that will slow down the editing process. If the timeline is set to Photo-JPEG, then it should not have to render. PJPEG is used as an offline “quick” format by editors many times.

“Is there another good codec for dvd that makes no codec installation necessary?”

Be careful what you say. By “for DVD”, one might assume that you mean for DVD viewing and final distribution on set-top players and computers. Like a movie rented at Blockbuster. I think that isn’t what you mean. You’re probably talking about using DVD-R or DVD+R media, or “data DVD”. If that’s the case, there’s no relation between DVD and codecs. You just want a codec that, for a given running time, will bring your total file size to maybe 4.6 GB or so.

“In my case 40 minutes of video shoul fit on 1 or 2 dvds a 4,7 GB.”

At 89% quality (or so), I have a PJPEG D1 movie at 4.3 MB/sec. 40 minutes of video at that rate would be about 40x60x4.3MB = 10 GB. Reducing the quality slider value will reduce the file size.

You could also try the Motion-JPEG-B codec.

Do some short tests.

But for any of this, Quicktime has to be installed on the machine of the person making the videos and reading the videos. See if you can still install the Quicktime 6 codec — I hear 7 is a little buggy for some people.

Hope that helps,
Steve