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New to compression, need advice on which to buy, please.
I have produced a 90 second video with music for a sample to put on my website. I am using a Mac G-4, Media 100 8.2 and Quicktime Pro 7. I exported the movie as a Quicktime movie. then, using QT pro compressed the 87mb down to 3mb. When I sent it to my website server and checked it, It worked great in QT on my Mac, it started after a few seconds and downloaded as you watched.
On two PC’s I have at home, it would not play the video, only the audio and gave a message that it was missing a component of Quicktime that was unavailable. (they have QT 6.5)
What I need to know is how to get this video example to work on a PC?
Do I need to buy Sorenson 3?, Sorenson 4? Flip4Mac? Cleaner 6?
What does anyone recommend? My server wants me to provide the clips and they set up the website. I need to have the right tools to get my examples set up but I do not want to spend more money than needed to get the job done. I just want visitors to be able to view a choice of several 1 minute examples of my work. Whether it is a PC or Mac I want them to be able to see high quality.
Any advice will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks,
Jerome -
7 Replies
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What codec did you use for compression in QT7?
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I might have used H.264 by mistake. But I thought I used Quicktime movie to quicktime movie. I am out of town for a week so can’t get back to try new set ups. But, from what I have read I need to get more than quicktime pro to make clips for both WinMedia and Quicktime. Sorenson Squeeze 4 and Discreet Cleaner 6 have been mentioned. Any knowledge of these two?
thanks,
Jerome -
Apparently there are problems with Cleaner 6 and Quicktime 7. Cleaner is also not compat with Tiger (although a fix is in the works). I just started using Cleaner, and have no experience with any compression programs. Went with Cleaner prior to knowing of the issues with QT7 and Tiger (although I don’t regret it as it has been highly praised by many as the better of the two–Sorenson). I have begun to use it on my older system (no Tiger, but QT7) and have had no problems. Autodesk has stated that they are going to get it compat with Tiger shortly. I am a complete newbie to this compression thing, so, you may want to wait for other responses. I actually came to this forum today in search of good training material for Cleaner 6.
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I have been having the same EXACT problem. It has been very frustrating for me to figure out. I have gotten some good advice on what codec to use. h264 is a codec only quicktime 7 can read so that is why it’s not working on teh PC’s. People have told me to try Sorenson as my codec. They say this is readable on all PC’s in earlier versions of quicktime. Come to find out it is! The only problem I am having now is keeping hte file size down. If you recder your movie as a quciktime out of FCP the file size is pretty small. I have tested with a two minute clip. The quicktime preset codec came otuto be about 3 -5 meg. While the Sorenson codec at a descent quality came out to be 100 meg. This can be a pain if you dont have a lot of bandwidth and will eat it up pretty fast. I havent came across any other solutions yet. I have posted several times on the topic but all I got was to render with Sorenson codec. I just wish there was something easier and more efficient. I heard Flip4mac works well but I am trying to not spend anymore money than I have to.
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1. H.264 can be read by a whole bunch of players other than QuickTime 7. That said you need much more horsepower to play back over something like Sorenson (which is years out of date)
2. If Autodesk update cleaner I’ll eat my hat.
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My favorite .mov encoder these days is Compression Master from Popwire, which gives a QT 6.0 and higher compatible MPEG-4 video stream that looks a lot better than Apple’s.
If you can live with a .mp4 file instead, Squeeze is a great choice, and quite a bit easier to learn than Compression Master (although not as deep).
If you’re new to compression, might I politely flog my book (like below in the .sig).
My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html -
I say we have a hat eating barbecue if Cleaner gets an update on the mac.
Also, per Sorenson Video 3 encoding, it sounds like you are probably encoding using only the standard version that you have access to with QT Pro. I would highly recommend getting the Pro version of the SV3 encoder. It can save you 25% the bitrate while still looking better.
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