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What is the best web video format? Having trouble with QT and Compressor conversion
Hi,
I am trying to take a clip of some of my work and put it on the web. I have done a lot of this in the past, but only on a PC. I have been trying to find a good file type, size, codec and compression rate in QT and Compressor but I’m not too excited about the results. I have tried exporting Quick Time with h.264 trying various options for image size and quality and even when the video looks bad, the file size is still pretty large. I tried using mp4 from compressor and it was worse. What do you suggest?When I was editing on Premiere Pro on a PC, I got the best looking web video exporting avi files from Premiere Pro and then converting them in Microsoft’s free media encoder into wmv files. I could get a 2 minute clip at 250 MBPS that generated a file about 3 MB that looked really good.
When I try creating a QT file with h.264, the 500 MBPS video doesn’t look nearly as good, but is 11 MB in size. Am I doing something wrong or should I be using a different web video format?
Michael
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12 Replies
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I am using FCP 4.5 with compressor, QT pro version 7.0.3.
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[Michael Kellam] “When I try creating a QT file with h.264, the 500 MBPS video doesn’t look nearly as good, but is 11 MB in size. Am I doing something wrong or should I be using a different web video format?”
what’s the length of your video? What’s the original format?
I compress HD for the web and it looks incredible. I compress DV for the web and it looks pretty good depending on which of the H.264 compressions I use. I generally use the 800 or 1mb LAN settings.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.comDirector, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.comNow Posting “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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Hi Walter,
I wish I was compressing HD for the web 😉 or doing anything else with HD for that matter!It’s 1:44 in length. I originated it in DV. The best clip I’ve gotten so far is using H.264 280×217, 8 bit mono 32khz audio at 762 Kbps and the clip is 9.5 MB. I’m still experimenting, but I’ve done quite a bit already. I’d like it to be a little bigger than 280×217, but I don’t really want to go too big on the download size.
The only reason I’m asking as I say is because I used to make wmv files that were 320×240 and about 3 MB for the same duration…
Michael
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[Michael Kellam] “Is H,264 your preferred codec for DV to web?”
Yep. I use the Web Download (Quicktime 7) 800Kbps or LAN settings for everything I do. I don’t really pay much attention to file size as I’m just working with broadband connections and QT 7 starts playing these files very quickly.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.comDirector, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.comNow Posting “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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Walter,
After looking at them side by side, I have come to the conclusion that I want more than the technology allows 😉 Something like great looking full screen HD quality in a handy 1 MB file.The H.264 looks good, so I think I’ll shoot for that even with the larger file sizes. Thanks for replying!
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[Michael Kellam] “The H.264 looks good, so I think I’ll shoot for that even with the larger file sizes. Thanks for replying!”
there are quite a few settings you can tweak and change in Compressor so be sure to try playing around in there to get the best look you can.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.comDirector, “The Rough Cut”
https://www.theroughcutmovie.comNow Posting “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network
“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters
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I played around with H.264 while you guys were discussing this. I used a talking head I had in my box that was 8-bit uncompressed from Beta. I used a frame size of 280×210. In video settings I set 500kbps as the data rate and in audio settings 96kbps. The resulting data rate was 512kbps (go figure). Final file size for a 1:50 clip was 7.8MB. The quality looked excellent. However, the clip was pretty static. If your clip has lots of action, that will stress the codec more and the overall visual quality will suffer. I bet I could drop the data another 100kbps or more for a talking head and still have very good quality. As Walter suggested, play with the settings.
John
Dual 2.5 G5 4 gigs RAM OS 10.4.3 QT7.0.3
Dual Cinema 23 Radeon 9800
FCP Studio 5 (FCP5.0.4, DVDSP4.0.2, Comp2.0.1, STP1.0.2)
Huge U-320R 1TB Raid 3 firmware ENG15.BIN
ATTO UL4D driver 3.50
AJA IO driver 2.1 firmware v23-28
SonicStudio HD DAW, Yamaha DM1000, Genelec Monitors -
John,
Yes, I’ll still play with the settings, but I’ve gotten a similar result to the one you got. I used slightly higher limits but there is a lot of detail and more movement than a talking head. I got a 9.5 MB file that looked good even considering the detail/movement. I’m gonna go with it for now, but I’ll keep testing to see if I can improve the wheel 😉Thanks for testing that!
Michael
Michael Kellam
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Just tried the same settings with a constantly moving image and the results were very good. Make sure in video settings that the compressor setting is best. That enables 2-pass encoding which will give much better results, although, it slows down the encoding time.
John
Dual 2.5 G5 4 gigs RAM OS 10.4.3 QT7.0.3
Dual Cinema 23 Radeon 9800
FCP Studio 5 (FCP5.0.4, DVDSP4.0.2, Comp2.0.1, STP1.0.2)
Huge U-320R 1TB Raid 3 firmware ENG15.BIN
ATTO UL4D driver 3.50
AJA IO driver 2.1 firmware v23-28
SonicStudio HD DAW, Yamaha DM1000, Genelec Monitors -
One thing you guys may be forgetting is frame rate. If you drop the frame rate to 15, you can essentially cut the file size in half with the change being nearly imperceptible. Ok, we can see the slightly added jitter on large movements, but generally 15fps is the accepted web frame rate.
500 is a great rate too, because it’ll start playing back instantly on DSL systems. H264 looks great, but if someone doesn’t have QT7 they’ll get an error and no info on why. QT doesn’t parse the version number and codecs, etc. It just checks for a QT plugin. I’ve gone back to sorensen 3 usually for compatibility.
Some recent examples here… https://www.joanproduces.com/portfolio/new – they use sorensen 3 with mp3 as the audio, stereo 22khz 16bit I think. 15fps and 30sec equals about 1.7 mb.
We originally used h264 and they looked immaculate at 3/4 the data rate and file size. But most of the clients weren’t able to see them. We didn’t want to clutter up the screen with a “qt 7 required” logo or something so we’ll wait until the world catches up.
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