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WATCHOUT : H.264? / pre-split clips
Hi all,
I’m creating content for a 11 projector watchout installation. The canvas size is approx 9200x76px. I have opted to work in AE at half res (Approx 4600×384) as anything bigger is just too slow to work with. The plan being to scale the split clips by 200% in watchout, which shouldn’t affect quality too much.
I am planning to splice into 5 clips each 1024×384, then position and re-scale inside watchout.
1) Can I encode into mpeg4 h.264 for watchout? Anyone have experience here?
2) can I encode 1024×384 as MPEG2 or does it need to follow standard PAL/NTSC resolution? If so how to spice?Any comments or suggestions greatly appreciated as the show is less than a week away!!
Cheers,
Andy -
2 Replies
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Hi Andy,
Q1: No experience, and doubt if anyone here has except for Bob who uses Watchout. You may get more answers and suggestions at the Dataton’s Showroom forum. Plenty of experienced users there.
Q2: Yes, since both 1024 and 384 are perfectly divisible by 16. There should be no problems encoding as MPEG-2.
But if you are coming from AE, the advice is to ouput from AE as uncompressed AVI or Quicktime’s Animation codec, then use a specialist encoder app such as Procoder or TMPEG to encode to MPEG-2. Apparently, going direct to MPEG-2 out of AE does not usually give a good/pleasing result.
Although the initial output from AE is an extra step, you will at least end up with a Master file that you can try compressing to other codecs or settings without having to resort to AE again.
Additionally, the uncompressed AVI or QT Animation codec is going to be exceptionally large and maybe unweildy for minor corrections, etc….so you may want to consider Sequenced Targa files so that any changes to a segment can be re-rendered out of AE quicker and replaced within the total sequence.
If this is your first time doing pre-splits, try a short duration first, say, 10secs across the panoramic, setup some projectors and check the result. Choose a good sequence where mis-alignment is easily visible (eg. graphic lines across the panoramic). Last I saw this (pre-splits), the alignment did not work and graphic lines were visibly out, and there was no time to ask the girl to try outputting out of AE again as we were already on-site.
good luck!
Thomas Leong -
Hi Andy,
Q1: No experience, and doubt if anyone here has except for Bob who uses Watchout. You may get more answers and suggestions at the Dataton’s Showroom forum. Plenty of experienced users there.
Q2: Yes, since both 1024 and 384 are perfectly divisible by 16. There should be no problems encoding as MPEG-2.
But if you are coming from AE, the advice is to output from AE as uncompressed AVI or Quicktime’s Animation codec, then use a specialist encoder app such as Procoder or TMPEG to encode to MPEG-2. Apparently, going direct to MPEG-2 out of AE does not usually give a good/pleasing result.
Although the initial output from AE is an extra step, you will at least end up with a Master file that you can try compressing to other codecs or settings without having to resort to AE again.
Additionally, the uncompressed AVI or QT Animation codec is going to be exceptionally large and maybe unwieldy for minor corrections, etc….so you may want to consider Sequenced Targa files so that any changes to a segment can be re-rendered out of AE quicker and replaced within the total sequence.
If this is your first time doing pre-splits, try a short duration first, say, 10secs across the panoramic, setup some projectors and check the result. Choose a good sequence where mis-alignment is easily visible (eg. graphic lines across the panoramic). Last I saw this (pre-splits), the alignment did not work and graphic lines were visibly out, and there was no time to ask the girl to try outputting out of AE again as we were already on-site.
good luck!
Thomas Leong
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