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Activity Forums Compression Techniques mov to flv without compressing

  • Tim Ward

    November 25, 2007 at 9:23 pm

    No. Every time you go from one format to another, you’re re-compressing. Sometimes you won’t lose any perceptible quality (like going DV25 to ProRes422), but you’re still re-arranging pixels.

    You CAN go from .mp4 to .m4v without losing quality, because you don’t re-compress, you just change the file extension, but it’s still MPEG-4 video.

    tim

  • Whitlock Dunbar

    November 26, 2007 at 1:43 pm

    OK I get it. But say I wanted to convert an uncompressed quicktime to .flv (via Squeeze) without any concern for how large the resulting file will be. Do I simple set all of the the quality settings to their highest values or is this a bit more complex than I’m assuming?

  • Tim Ward

    November 26, 2007 at 2:43 pm

    Kind of. I’m still learning the ins and outs of Squeeze and FLVs myself, but I do know that you should set it to your source resolution, select the proper aspect ratio, and use a 1:1 frame rate, using the On2 VP6 codec.

    Beyond that, I don’t feel comfortable telling any more than that, but maybe some of the pros here will jump in.

    tim

  • Whitlock Dunbar

    November 26, 2007 at 3:30 pm

    Thanks Tim. Perhaps I’ll start a new thread if no one responds here.

  • Daniel Low

    November 27, 2007 at 5:06 pm

    To minimise the quality loss while transcoding:
    Keep the frame rate & frame size the same and increase the datarate for both audio and video, by how much will really depend on the content and how sucessful will depend on the source .mov codec.

    Don’t forget, you can’t polish a turd.

  • Whitlock Dunbar

    November 28, 2007 at 1:04 pm

    Believe me I gotten my share of turd polishing requests! In this case however I have properly lit head shots (shot with the HVX) composited with text in After Effect, and rendered out as Animation Codec .mov files. Problem is the text after flv conversion looks much softer and a bit ragged compared to the source. I increased to bit rate to 3000 and maxed out the quality settings (as best as I understand), but the output was still sub-par.

    Other than my being a novice, I think my expectations for Flash video are too high. Like everyone else, I assume H.264 integration into Flash will help these quality issues.

  • Daniel Low

    November 28, 2007 at 2:33 pm

    You can get some great results using VP6/Flash, not as good as H.264 but still. Look at these examples of what you can achieve with Youtube:
    https://youtube.com/watch?v=WBWCxrsUh14
    and
    https://youtube.com/watch?v=sTj5Ur1E6HA

    Obviously ‘quality’ is subjective.
    You might get better results using a different transcoder, I highly rate Episode, for example.

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