Charles Simonson
Forum Replies Created
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Note, that the QT 7 available for Windows is still in preview mode, and there are still bugs in it (although the current preview is MUCH better than the first preview release). So, until it reaches gold status, and the adoption rate is high enough, I wouldn’t even consider H.264 for delivery to PC clients.
As far as which is better, well for 1080p and bitrates under 10mbps, I would have to say AVC is the leader. For 720p under 8mbps, Windows Media is very competitive and can actually best AVC in some cases. For 480p under 2mbps, AVC is the clear winner. And at lower resolutions, Windows Media again shines. Most of the AVC encoders I have used appear to be focusing more on HD resolutions, which may explain the better results for the most part with larger frame sizes. Windows Media 9 encoders generally try and optimize for all output sizes, which may explain why it can produce better results at the smaller sizes.
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If all you need to do is compress your HDV clip into something that will provide a high quality image and fit in under 1400MBs, then most of the usual software encoder suites will be able to do this. The top encoders on the market IMHO are Compression Master 3 (Mac), Canopus ProCoder 2 (PC), and Sorenson Squeeze 4 (Mac and PC). If working with HD, my choice would be Compression Master due to its excellent scaling and processing abilities. Using a 2-pass VBR encoder mode with any of these suites will provide the result you are looking for, where the “high action” parts consume more bits than the “talking head” parts. Just pick an average (target) bitrate that you want to achieve that will make your video fit onto 2 discs, and let the encoder make the decisions. Note, you may have to demultiplex the HDV video before encoding it. A great tool for doing this on the mac is MPEG StreamClip. And a good calculator for determining your bitrate is here: https://www.3ivx.com/support/calculator/index.html
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The most annoyong thing for me is the BlackMagic codec under Windows for HD. If you don’t have the QT Info window on top of your video, or at least 15% of your video off the screen, then the gamma and luminence is all shot to hell.
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Ben, I normally agree, but I have had some issues lately with v210 10bit AVI files and ProCoder. CM wasn’t perfect either, but it was closer to the source.
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BTWB, have you checked my profile lately? 😉 -
Never used it myself, but here is the pdf for the product I imagine they are talking about:
https://www.pinnaclesys.com/SupportFiles/TMW_ReadMe.pdf
Whether or not you want to explore this route, there are some software-based encoders out there, that, when paired with a fast machine and fast storage system, offer very near real-time encoding these days, at the same high quality that you can expect from a hardware-based solution. Of course, this only refers to SD encoding right now.
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No, 2MB is fine. For a one minute clip, I would say anything in the 480h range that is over 6MB may be overkill. 4MB is a good target. For 320h, 2-3MB is a good high ground, while 1-2MB is great if quality doesn’t suffer significantly.
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You definitely don’t want to go to DV as an intermediary format. For an intermediary, the only two compressed codecs I would consider are QT Photo-JPEG for progressive, and QT MJPEG for interlaced. But, you probably don’t need to use an intermediary anyway, as most compression suites can take PAL MPEG-2 and convert it to whatever format you want. I tested a PAL MPEG-2 and used it in Compressor 2 and Compression Master 3.1, and both did the conversion to 23.98 (w/ pulldown) and 29.97 just fine. Of course, you will need to recompress the movie, but the resulting quality I got from 5mbps encodes was very good, considering what I was working from. I am pretty sure ProCoder 2 can handle MPEG-2 sources as well on the PC.
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For the best color transference converting between one format and the other, Compression Master 3 is the way to go. You didn’t say what format you are converting from and to what codec you want to go to, as some codecs naturally produce a more saturated image, but in general, CM3 has the best preprocessing to compensate color issues.
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MPEG-2 is definitely not the solution. MPEG-4 is much better for the web, but if you were having problems with that, then you should look into the following: use MPEG-1, which will guarantee compatibility, but offers the lowest quality at the highest bitrates; or use Sorenson Video 3 for mac users and Windows Media 9 for PC users, both of which offer excellent quality at nominal bitrates.
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Well, the main reason those settings are recommended is not because of playback issues, but because of network datarate issues. The user didn’t state what market he needed to target his settings for, so its a bit hard to tell, but what you provided should work well on most capable networks these days. (His profile does say Australia, but I can’t say I know much about that market’s mobile networks.) Note, with those typical settings, my Nokia 3650 that is now about two and a half years old can play back the content fine.