[Andy Engelkemier]

Ha, I never hovered over those three buttons there to see what they were. I’ll give that a try.

I Think also that turning off/on visibility of that video track refreshes it as well. I haven’t confirmed that completely yet, but it did work once at least.

[Andy Engelkemier]

Oops, mistype. Thanks for the correction on profile. It’s confusing because it says “advanced profile” for 9-advanced. I know they are different codecs though.

And that should have been written, When they don’t care about size. Occasionally they don’t, so I give them high quality. I usually take it down a little bit just to make sure it’s not so insanely high that their drives can’t keep up. Plus, in case someone plays it off of a network drive then it needs to keep up too. But I’ve found the preset for 720p HQ works great in those cases. The audio is usually way overkill for what I’ve got, but I’d rather not mess anything up since it’s seems finicky sometimes.

I’m more concerned about the Premiere bug I’ve just encountered now though.

[Andy Engelkemier]

I tried changing the frame size and they noticed immediately. If I am able to create the powerpoint, I agree because then I can just scale it. In fact, half of the video I’m working on now was recorded at 480i and I have it stretched up to 720 and no one noticed.

Now if you have some trick that I can save it at something smaller like 480×960 then have the codec tell the player what size to stretch too, I’m all ears. The only time I’ve gotten away with that is by providing the slide, or embedding it in a webpage For them. Something like that. When the deliverable is a straight video I’m stuck with the size they ask for. I’ve already told them they won’t notice a quality change from 1080 to 720. 90% of the time I wouldn’t even notice on a large screen either unless they are played back to back.

I’ll give the profile 8 a try next time and see how that fairs at lower bitrates. If they don’t care about size I just check the 720p HQ and render. Done! Sure it’s a 500MB presentation, but that’s why you have that 3TB hard drive on your desk. haha

[Andy Engelkemier]

good to know the advanced profile is only 12. But I do have 12. I haven’t been using the advanced profile either.

I agree, 500 is a bit low for anything moving at a decent speed on 1280×720, but I’m already reducing their originals from 1920×1080, so any further and they’ll notice it.

Unfortunately it’s pretty impossible to dummy proof. One guy will open it in VLC, the next guy will double click to open it and only has the default, and another might try and open it on a Mac and doesn’t know anything other than quicktime exists. Well that’s rare in the corporate world so I chose to ignore the last one. 😉 If you’re in a corporation and insist on using a Mac then you better learn how to convert things for compatibility on your own right?

And the reason I use media encoder is to save time and space. You can render premiere and afterEffects file without having to render uncompressed first, otherwise I might see about getting Squeeze.

[Andy Engelkemier]

No, really low for 720p30, but not terrible.

Somewhere between 500-1000kbps is where it likes to fail.
The odd thing is, if I lower it just a little more, sometimes it ends up playing back fine. Also in different players it may/may not play.

I need to make sure anything I give someone ends up working in powerpoint (ugh). But usually they also want an emailable file. So if the file is 3 minutes long, and our limit is 8MB it can get a little problematic. Doable, but the quality starts to suffer.

[Andy Engelkemier]

Ugh, It must be a problem with Adobe Media Encoder then.
Because I saved 10 files, just to confirm what you guys are saying. I started at 720p30 HQ preset on WMV and continually lowered the bitrate setting.
Wouldn’t you know it, 2 of them wouldn’t play back.

I agree, simply lowering the settings doesn’t necessarily make a file not play back, but that doesn’t mean at certain specific bitrates it may cause some ugly math and make it not play back. That’s what I was trying to find out.

It seems though, that the information that is out there is either So technical that I don’t want to bother with trying to understand it, or it’s so simplistic that it doesn’t help. I’ve got all the basic concepts down. It’s what to do when something strange like this goes on that I have troubles with.

[Andy Engelkemier]

This article will help with that.

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/onneweer_barend/colorgrading_1.php

That’s what I was looking to learn.

[Andy Engelkemier]

I’m not sure I agree with Adobe’s idea that it’s more important to keep a consistent speed than directions, but at least I know a good way to solve it.

No curve editor should Ever look like that between two keys. The funny thing is, I’ve had this before, and fixed it by deleting all keys and creating them again, but in a different order. I’m not sure how that even makes sense.

[Andy Engelkemier]

Shoot, I Might have figured it out. So please correct me if I’m wrong.

Are you guys separating dimensions when doing position animations? As soon as I did that I seem to understand everything that is going on.

I’m sure there is a reason they did that, but I don’t see it. The limitation in having them separate is now I don’t get a speed graph for knowing how fast the thing is actually moving, it’ll only show it for one direction. I guess the only thing I’d need that for is an effect on an expression and then I would just add the two together if they remain separated for those purposes as well.

[Andy Engelkemier]

looks like a useful site.

What I’m trying to learn is why doing something like changing nothing but the bitrate on the audio and video lower will make the same file not play back.

The type of information I’m finding though, is more related to when you can move up/down in bitrate and what quality is acceptable.

Sometimes I’m already below what we want in terms of quality, so all I want to do is make sure it’s under a certain file size so it can be emailed. That’s usually the request. This last time I had a several minute video and I was just trying to make it as reasonably small as I could so I could send review files.