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Recommended hour long low res file for transcriptionist
Hi gang –
I am sending an hour long interview to a transcriptionist to log with TC reader. What is a good enough low res file to send? I was thinking mp4, 640 x 380, 1000 kb. Is that too big? Any suggestions? Thanks! -Mark
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4 Replies
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Mark,
We send out to our transcribers a 480×270 mp4 at about 350 kbps on a daily basis and never have any complaints. That gets us around 120 Mb for a 1-hour show. Even at that size any action reference they need is clearly visible.
Don Hertz
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[Don Hertz] “We send out to our transcribers a 480×270 mp4 at about 350 kbps on a daily basis and never have any complaints.”
I’m a stickler for accuracy. .mp4 is a wrapper which can have some variants. You probably mean H.264 .mp4 and at those low bit rates using an x264 encoder would be best (better than MainConcept). High Profile CABAC could help. VBR may do better than CBR.
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Thanks guys — much appreciated! Yes, .mp4 with H.264 as the codec. Craig, I appreciate your quest for accuracy.
Interesting update: last night I exported 3 hours of time-coded interviews with .mp4, H.264, 320 x 240, 1000 kb, and it took my Mac Book Pro 15 hours to export the file using 800 firewire. It ended up being just over a gig. That seems like a LONG time to export. So, I will take Don’s advice and check out his suggested settings as I have two more files to export.
Just another day in paradise!
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Craig is correct. H264 mp4 VBR are all a part of our settings. I’m not sure how long the encode takes as we have the luxury of dropping it into a watch folder on our server and it handles the encode while we head off to other tasks. Being H264 though, I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t take you a while.
Don
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