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Production Compression
Hi all. I could use some guidance with compression for internal production.
OS: Windows XP Pro
Software available: Vegas 5, Premiere 6, AfterEffects 6
Video source: 720×480@24fps
Audio source: 44.1kHz 16bit stereoI have a 3 minute sequenced audio/video animation that I now need to share with my partner who will import this into his own project. I need to maintain the highest quality because when he’s done he will recompress my video with his into a master file. I calculate an uncompressed file to be around 4GB. I’m worried that Windows XP (32-bit) will croak on files larger than 2GB.
In the past years, I’ve used Ligos Indeo 5.11 and have been satisfied with the quality vs filesize. However, in the past, I’ve done video for multimedia CDs, and this project is for DVD (higher-res, for one thing). Indeo 5.11 isn’t really cutting it anymore. I get unacceptable levels of artifacts even at highest quality settings. I’m looking for compression reccomendations, not as a final public codec, but internal transfer. Just something minimal to keep file sizes in check. I’m really a novice when it comes to compression techniques.
Oh, one more note: Ultimately I’d like to pull-down to 30fps, but I’m not sure if Vegas will interpolate keyframing at 30 or render 24 and then pulldown to 30. To be safe, I was going to render at 24 and then re-render that result at 30, so compression becomes very important.
Thanks in advance!
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2 Replies
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I’d encode in the same codec that the guy on the other end is producing to. Ideally this would be something like DV50, which offers decent compression but good quality with animation sources.
FYI, there isn’t a file size limit of note with an NTFS formatted drive – FAT32 maxes out at 4 GB, though.
For animation, rendering in PNG is mathematically lossless, and can do quite nicely with motion graphics.
Most NLE’s these days do pulldown correctly. I can’t confirm this with Vegas, so it’s worth a shot.
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 -
Thanks! I’ve been playing around and I found that zipping the uncompressed results in 25% original size, which is just fine! I also checked out the demo of DV50 and it does a phenominal job, compressing to roughly 25% with extreme minimal loss of quality! Thanks for the excellent tip!
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