Charles Simonson
Forum Replies Created
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It’s a little surprising to read that (in answer to your question, yes, I was refering to SV3 encodes, not general QT encoding)… but I do remember PC Cleaner as being a good product back in the day. Any way, I didn’t mention Cleaner because I have pretty much given up on the Cleaner series, as I find it rather insulting they are charging so much for a rather minor upgrade after all of this time (still no support for QT7 or DivX 6 on the PC!). Also, their customer support is terrible and the interface of XL just plain stinks IMHO.
I’d recommend Squeeze over Cleaner XL today because Squeeze comes with the Sorenson Video 3 Pro encoder (saves money if you don’t have the pro encoder already) and has a much better interface than Cleaner. Although I will concede that the pre-processing features of Cleaner are probably much better, Sorenson has proven they are committed to continually enhancing development on the product. I used to believe that encoding to SV3 could be done better with apps besides Squeeze, but that was before the release of Squeeze 4.1, which pretty much fixed all of the SV3 issues.
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The best thing to do is keep the 10GB AVI you currently have, bring it to a PC, download and install VirtualDub and the Lagarith codec, and convert from the uncompressed RGB AVI file you currently have to a Lagarith AVI file. When handing off the file to the client, be sure to include the Lagarith codec so they can play back the file. By using this codec, you can maintain the proper RGB color space of your AE project and deliver a file at around 1.5GB, with excellent quality and almost no loss in perceptible detail. Transcoding to this codec is very fast and will net you a file about 16% of the original’s size.
https://lags.leetcode.net/codec.html
https://www.virtualdub.org/ -
I would try for somewhere in the 10MB final size range. Here is a good calculator to determine your rates:
https://www.3ivx.com/support/calculator/ -
Its not really a bug. Its just that Apple has implemented a very poor color converter in Quicktime Pro. Basically, Apple’s response is “What do you expect for a $30 piece of software?” The fact that QT Pro has the exact same feature set on the PC as the mac is supposed to be good enough (the mac version has many of the same problems with color).
About the only thing you can do on the PC, because QT7 still hasn’t been well integrated into any of the popular encoding apps, is to use a different H.264 encoder. The encoder in Squeeze 4.3 is OK, and should handle color pretty well and offer compatibility with QT7 play back. The Nero (ATeme) encoder is better, and its output should be compatible with QT7 play back as well. For overall quality, I currently really like the encoder from MainConcept, but its output is not directly compatible with QT7. There is also the open-source x.264 project, but again, QT7 compatibility is not easily achieved.
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Most likely they are using the On2VP6 codec to encode their Flash FLVs. This codec will give you the best quality video when encoding for Flash. The codec can be purchased separately for use in apps like Squeeze, or in a basic encoding app from On2. While this codec is very good for web video, the newest version of the Sorenson Spark codec included with Squeeze 4.3 is also quite good.
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What is the frame rate of your source? And to clarify, you did mean 1080p, not 1080i, correct? It appears to be some kind of cadence issue. My initial thought is that pull-down was not properly enabled. Also, you should try transcoding the source from 1080p to uncompressed 480p first, then try the MPEG-2 compression to see if that helps. Compressor 2’s image processing features can be buggy, but I thought most of the issues were fixed with the last update.
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You lose quality because you are compressing the images and frames from the source. As is the case with all forms of compression, it never looks exactly as good as the source. Compressor 2 does have a good MPEG-2 encoder if all you need to do is go from the source codec to MPEG-2. If you need to scale, deinterlace, or adjust color however, Compressor’s shortcomings can easily be seen. One solution if you need to apply some preprocessing to your source before the actual encoding is to use Popwire Compression Master 3. CM3 has the best of breed preprocessing filters in a software package under $1000 on the market today. You can do the preprocessing with CM to an uncompressed codec, and then use that as the source for Compressor. Or you can just use the MPEG-2 encoder included with CM, as it too is quite good.
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Also, Procoder 2 from Canopus on the PC is very good. For QT and Flash encoding, I’d still go with Squeeze, but for WMV, Real, and MPEG-2, I’d recommend Canopus.
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I’m taking a guess that you aren’t using the Sorenson Video 3 Professional encoder and are just using the standard version. The pro version costs extra, and can be purchased as just an encoder or bundled into Sorenson’s Squeeze 4 app. It includes features such as two-pass encoding and true VBR support. Other options include using a two-pass MPEG-4 Part 2 Simple profile encoder like the one Popwire includes in Compression Master 3. Both codecs will offer about the same quality at the same bit rate. If you are only on a PC, I would recommend Squeeze. On a mac, I’d recommend CM3.
I encode a lot of video for PSP and Video iPod distribution. The frame size for these videos is 368×208, comparable to the frame size of the movie you linked to. At that resolution, I encode my videos at about the same bit rate as you have and they look fantastic (I also use HD sources).
The first flag that I see when I look at you encode is that you have not encoded the audio! If I extract the video track from your movie, I get a file about 2.1MB in size. Your audio is taking up 5MB of the movie! This should definitely be encoded to achieve a more downloadable-friendly file size. If you don’t have many tools or codecs at your disposal, I would recommend either MP3 or IMA4:1 if you use SV3 or AAC if you use MPEG-4. Also, if you want to use QT7, there is an excellent multipass H.264 encoder in the Pro version. However, using H.264 forces your user to have QT7 installed, which is not certain, and in many cases not recommended.
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The amount you can fit on a CD really depends on what you want from an output perspective. You could fit over 4 hours of low-res low-bit rate encoded video or only 40 minutes of full-res high-bit rate video for SD. The amount of time you can encode for a CD is totally dependent upon the bit rate you choose. But overall, these days with the best WMV9, H.264, and FLV8 encoders, you can fit quite a lot at very high quality and at a nice sized resolution.