Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
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We have some clients that have digital signage, typically made by companies like Daktronics, Barco and others. While the LED electronic signs and video screens are amazing, their software and input formats are not.
The Daktronics systems require .avi files compressed using really old codecs. Same with some banks that have screens that play video on ATMs and the like. The screens are modern, but the video codecs they take are not. Maybe that’s part of it. We ended up getting the manual for the Daktronics board we output videos for and found that they had a software update that would add .wmv as an option. But the client was unwilling to update their software. Oh well. We gave them what they needed/wanted.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
We do a lot of compression for clients as well as a fair amount of work helping them setup video based sites. One religious based site had over 300 videos on it, and another in the low hundreds.
I vote for the host yourself route. You also don’t have to put them on your own servers. You can find video based servers to host videos for your own site that are quite reasonable. Bits on the Run is one, and the guy that started that is the same guy that helped YouTube develop it’s player interface and engine at startup. He also now sells and develops the JWPlayer, a really top-notch flash player with all sorts of great javascript capabilities.
I agree with Todd in that when I see videos on people’s sites embedded from YouTube it just strikes me as “cheap” and lazy. Maybe that’s just snobbery…I don’t know, but to me it’s just cleaner and more professional to have a nicely designed page with nice player interfaces.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
We do a LOT of compression in addition to production…and while we’ve done projects both ways, 30P almost always looks better on the web compared to 24P.
Conversely, 24P almost always looks better on television than 30P if you’re talking about cinematic feel. But…24P can look good on the web too…just not as clean as 30P does.
But we’ve also run into issues with 24P material with broadcasters that use Telestream products for their ingest. If they don’t setup the target file properly, the fields get reversed. We went so far as to send Telestream test files of our encodes because a local station and the local cable system (Insight) kept reversing fields on our MPG2 files. While the other 5 local broadcasters all had no problems with our files.
Telestream confirmed our files were fine (they asked us to send them and they examined them) and even sent us a recommended fix to give to the 2 offending broadcasters…who…you guessed it…refused to use it because they didn’t want to mess with their settings. The local cable station’s OWN promos air with the fields reversed so they ingest their own material wrong!
Some high-end encoding software has pull-up (which removes the extra frames and theoretically changes the project to 24P), but it can be squirelly and doesn’t always work as advertised.
For these reasons, we do a LOT more 30P now and only do 24P on projects where we absolutely want a more cinematic feel. We send the offending stations a betaSP dub to avoid the field reversal issue on those. Oddly enough, 30P files present no problems with those same two broadcasters.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Procoder can also handle what you need and it’s bascially Carbon Coder without the ability to handle as many input and output formats. But it can easily handle what you describe.
There’s also a freebie app you could try called MediaCoder. It’ll do batches and should handle your input/output requirements. The only negative is you have to figure out how to turn off the programs web popups. It will pause every 8 or so encodes from a large batch and ask you to visit a “sponsor’s” site. You can turn it off but you have to dig deep into the advanced settings to do so and there are about 3 different settings you have to “uncheck” to get it to stop. The program also opens to a web page upon launch, but there’s a checkbox at the bottom of that website you just untick to make that stop. It’s open-source software much like Handbrake, and if you can get past the popups, it works very well. The other drawback is because it’s interface can be confusing. But they’ve recently updated it to where you can set it up in a more simplified mode that doesn’t require a lot of user knowledge or intervention.
Just remember it’s free software and it’s interface and function isn’t going to be as elegant as a paid app. But we use it occasionally and when configured properly, it’s an excellent app.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Looks like interlace artifacts to me. We need to know how the original uncompressed file was created. Pixel resolution (1920×1080; 1280×720; 720×486 etc.), frame rate, pulldown or no pulldown; was it rendered with fields or frames etc.
My guess is you rendered fields. With such a simple animation and such slow movement, and considering your final output is displayed on a computer, I’d render using frames and turn on motion blur. It’ll take a little longer to render, but that should eliminate what you’re seeing. I don’t know of anything in compressing to an flv that would cause what you’re seeing.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
The new question is what to do about this. Why is VLC “outside” of the Huey Pro correction, and is there any way to get it to be effected by the color changes made by the monitor calibration?
I don’t know that you can or that it’s worth spending the time trying. But every media player is going to show some differences in the resulting file, because every media player will use a different method of decoding the file. I’d just worry about which media player your end file will most likely be played on.
One question I have is if the Avid DV codec has the option of adding 7.5% setup or keeping it at 0? Some DV codecs work in the 0-255 range, meaning black is 0% black. If you’re working in NTSC land, a codec might change that to the NTSC equivalent, which I believe is 15-235 or something thereabout.
You’ll drive yourself crazy trying to make your file look the same on every media player. I don’t think it’ll happen.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
I should clarify that the H264 files that I have trouble playing on older hardware are using Flash Player.
Those same H264 files will indeed play on the old PC if I load them into VLC or (another media player like gzine) that can pseudo-stream from a website or FTP. So the problem isn’t specifically the H264/mp4 file but the combination of using Flash and H264. Older hardware just can’t handle the processing needed to run both Flash and decode the H264.
So I guess you could deduce that flv files must require less processing from a flash player than H264 files. That’s generally the conclusion of most compression pundits, but there have been tests that Jan Ozer has done with HD encoded files that show the opposite depending on the platform (Mac or Windows) used to playback the files.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Again…it comes down to how you’re comparing the QTref file with the encoded file. Are you playing the original file and the encoded file on the same media player on the same monitor?
If so, then I cannot explain the differences you’re seeing with the Main Concept codec. Maybe it’s something specific to squeeze? Also, what codec does the original file use?
We see differences in our files from media player to media player and from monitor to monitor, but not as significant as you’re reporting. And we encode video from ALL sorts of source material, from Quicktime using a variety of Quicktime codecs (including Apple’s H264) to AVIs using all kinds of different codecs all the way to half a dozen flavors of MPEG2, WMV, P2/MXF and codecs I’ve never heard of.
There is not surefire way to “calibrate” a computer monitor (that I’m aware of) for video playback. From my knowledge, all you can do is test it on as many configurations as possible and feasible given the time and budget, and limit the number of encodes to as few as possible to get to your final output version.
I guess the question comes down to which player is the most common one to view mp4 files. Is it QT? You said you used a flash player, but does this include mp4 files, or are you talking about using h.264 with flv files?
We use both, but primarily we use mp4 using the Main Concept H264 codec. But we’ve also used the X264 (open source) codec as well. FLV files can look very good too, but you typically have to up the data rate some to get them to match the quality of H264. The only advantage that I’m aware flv files have is they’ll often playback on older hardware, whereas H264 tends to choke on older computers. As an example, I have a 12 year old Win98 computer in my kitchen that’s only used for internet and word processing. It will play flv files of any kind smoothly from the internet, but can only play H264 files at a frame rate of about 1 every 2 seconds..so they look like bad slide shows.
Daniel Low from this list might have some additional info he could give you as to reasons for what you see.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
It’s not clear from your post what specific codec you’re using. Apple’s H264 codec is the only H264 codec that I’m aware of that has a gamma problem. So if you’re using Main Concept (or another codec besides Apple’s) to encode your files, you shouldn’t make any adjustments to your final output.
If you ARE using Apple’s H264 codec for final output, most people will tell you: DON’T. It will look washed out on all other players.
So if your original video has correct color/luminance values (as judged on a waveform/vectorscope and not by eye or on your monitor), then encoding it with Main Concept’s H264 shouldn’t necessitate any adjustments in color. That resulting encode will probably look different when played with Quicktime than it will when played with all other media players. But it also won’t look exactly the same from say VLC to Zoom Player or Mplayer or Gzine or Real Player or half a dozen other media players.
Our policy is to test final output on the media player the video is most likely to be played on, which if it’s for the web, is typically flash player. We usually test files on several PCs as well just to see how it looks on various monitors and OS, including LCD and CRT monitors, because LCD monitors have different default gamma output compared to CRT monitors.
So the bottom line is your file is never going to look exactly the same on every media player or monitor. You can only control it to the extent that you test it on the most likely player and end user hardware setup.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
If your budget is limited, that would be your best compromise. I believe people call that near-line storage or something like that. What we do is backup all of our video, audio and project files every night using Second Copy (great, low-cost, easy to use backup software), so we basically have exact duplicates of our shared storage drives our rack-mount LaCie network drives.
They’re actually fast enough to edit simple, short-form projects that don’t have more than 2 or 3 video streams, so if we had a major crash, we could probably still get short form stuff out the door by rendering a project to this drive. It’s definitely not fast or robust enough for everyday use though and it’ll choke after playing about a minute of video even if it’s just a stream or two.
You should really check out some of the companies that advertise here on the Cow, Maxx digital gets a lot of good feedback and Bob Zelin (forum moderator) is very high on them. But there are also companies out there like EditShare, Studio Network Solutions and others that sell turnk-key solutions. We just found that Apace was the most affordable and the most flexible in terms of how you can set a system up among the turn-key companies.
You can probably build something yourself that will work…but you’ll spend a LOT of time, and if something DOESN’T work right or breaks down after you’ve got it working, guess who fixes it? That’s right…YOU! So that’s why it’s worth it to pay more for a system that’s proven. I believe all of Bob’s DIY configurations are for Mac bases systems, but he may be able to give you some pointers on a Windows/CS4 based solution too.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com