[Ben Waggoner]

The only thing you can’t do in CM that you can do in Squeeze is 2-pass VBR.

As Charles suggests, the better preprocessing of CM means you can often get better results in CM 1-pass VBR than in Squeeze 2-pass VBR.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

Also, HD is normally in the 709 color space, while Flash and other video expect 601. ProCoder is the best app for handling that conversion. It doesn’t have native Flash, but can work with the Macromedia export component.

That said, the color space conversion is only critical when color accuracy is critical.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

I believe Encore will let you import .AVI or .MOV files, and when you go to build the disc, will pick the data rate so that everything will fit. Very slick.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

H.263 is a subset of MPEG-4 Simple Profile, and so is more compatible.

But 3GPP works on far from all PDA’s. Honestly, you’ll need to pick a format for the specific device to guarantee compatibility.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

I’d encode in the same codec that the guy on the other end is producing to. Ideally this would be something like DV50, which offers decent compression but good quality with animation sources.

FYI, there isn’t a file size limit of note with an NTFS formatted drive – FAT32 maxes out at 4 GB, though.

For animation, rendering in PNG is mathematically lossless, and can do quite nicely with motion graphics.

Most NLE’s these days do pulldown correctly. I can’t confirm this with Vegas, so it’s worth a shot.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

B-frames are a good thing. They improve compression efficiency, and offer a useful, simple scalability mode.

I don’t know why most WMV tools don’t over a control over them. The only one I know of that does is Compression Master.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

Well, we certainly know that they use interframe compression. ALL significant delivery codecs (as opposed to content for video content authoring, like DV) use interframe compression, since it provides massive improvements in compression efficiency. It’s been nearly a decade since any web content used intraframe (pre Sorenson Video QuickTime would use Photo-JPEG back around QT 2.5 and Movie Cleaner Pro 1.2). Oh, and maybe some pre v6 Flash video that also used JPEG.

An easy way to detect this is whether a codec offers a keyframe setting. Intraframe encoding only uses keyframes, so don’t have a way to say how often to use them.

A somewhat more interesting question is which modern codecs use Bidirectional Prediction, where a frame can reference a frame in the future, as opposed to only frames in the past.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html

[Ben Waggoner]

Motion JPEG is a QuickTime file format. What you want is a MPEG-1 .mpg file. That is the best looking format that plays in both DirectShow and QuickTIme, which are used by PowerPoint Win and Mac, respectively, to play back digital media files.

Also, make sure you encode it in square pixel mode (like 320×240). Older versions of Windows had trouble with non-square MPEG-1 files for playback.

My Book: https://www.benwaggoner.com/books.htm
Squeeze and ProCoder tutorials: https://www.classondemand.net/benwaggoner/
Compression Class at Stanford: https://www.digitalmediaacademy.org/compression.html