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Video Compression Idea
Greetings, recently I was talking with an Apple trainer daydreaming about sending full video via FTP to another facility. He mentioned that I should compress the video using the H264 codec send the file. The people receiving the file could bring the H264 clip on the FCP timeline and uncompress it and then print to tape and send that tape to the TV station. I got excited but forgot to get the details from the trainer. Is there anyone that can tell me if this will work and if so how, specifically, it should be done. Thank you for the answer.
The TechnoRev
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12 Replies
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Apple Trainers are a dime a dozen. This sounds like pure poppycock of the highest order. Tell your Apple Trainer to come here so that I, and the others here can smack his BS butt!
We’re all COW. No BS!
Cheers
Roland Kahlenberg
broadcastGEMs
customizable animated backdrops with Adobe After Effects project files -
Like Clifford said, poppycock.
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One key element of the poppycoccity is the directive to “uncompress” the file.
If the trainer meant “restore the file to its original quality as it was before compression to the H.264 codec”, that is impossible.
However, if the trainer meant “decompress the file”, then that is what happens whenever you view a compressed movie. You decompress it so you can view the data. However, the quality does not return to that of the original, since there had to be some quality loss in the compression process.
It is possible to send high-quality lossless (compressed using a zip-like process) video via FTP, but depending on the size of the video, sending a tape by courier may be faster. Even if it’s going overseas. 🙂
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Hi,
Of course it can be done. In fact, you don’t even need to compress the files. Of course it might be faster to put the video on a firewire drive and then walk it to the client – even if the client is across the country.
There are a lot of variables to consider before dismissing the idea, however. Particularly, what is the length of the video you want to ftp? If it is short.. under a few minutes, for example, and you want to get it to a client who is across the country, then that method might be very useful. For anything longer, you are probably better off shipping a firewire drive to a post house that can print to tape rather than trying to ftp the file.
While h.264 can look really good, you can lose color saturation and fidelity if you are not careful. You need to experiment and tweak the compression settings to make sure the video looks okay before you commit to compressing a large file.
You might want to consider Digital Anarchy’s Microcosm codec. It costs $100 for the encoding module, but the play back module is free… What is really swell about this codec is that it is lossless and can support alpha channels. You would have to make sure the post house that would receive the file can install the playback codec, but any technically savvy post house shouldn’t have a problem with this. Supposedly it provides very good compression without losing visual information.
Obviously unless you have some really, really high speed connections on both ends, files that get up into the over 1 Gigabyte range are probably going to be more trouble than it is worth.
If what you are looking to do is simply ftp the file rather than putting it on a drive and taking it to the post house down the street then in may not be worth the effort.
What it comes down to is this; is it a faster and/or better use of your time to deal with ftp than it is to put the file on a drive and take it to a post house? If you use a lossy codec, will the loss in quality needed to get the file down to an acceptable size be acceptable to your client?
In the past I have preferred to use an uncompressed format, copied to a firewire drive and hauled the 15 miles to the client’s studio (even for 10 second long animations) rather than risk the loss in quality that would be needed to squeeze them through the phone lines.
That said, if you live in Circle, Alaska, ftp is going to be your best friend. (well… maybe the moose will be your best friend, but that’s a post for a completely different forum.)
Hope this helps,
Lars
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>>> “(well… maybe the moose will be your best friend, but that’s a post for a completely different forum.)”
Do you have any links ?
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>>> https://www.mooseworld.com/
I am already banned from mooseworld, I will just have to search around.
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Well, technically h.264 supports lossless compression, so it is possible. However, I think Apple’s limited h.264 implementation doesn’t support it (though I have never personally used their codec, I just hear that it is extremely limited and incomplete compared to other h.264 codecs).
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Not that it is perfectly in line with your request but Digital Anarchy’s Microcosm
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[Lars Bunch] “What it comes down to is this; is it a faster and/or better use of your time to deal with ftp than it is to put the file on a drive and take it to a post house?”
Indeed. I’ve found that driving across town is faster than downloading via FTP. And then there’s the possibility of broken downloads that have to be restarted.
On the other hand, my client in Texas used to download Motion-JPEG :30 spots from our FTP in Toronto, and that took about 2 hours. So FTP was the way to go in that case.
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