Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
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Explain “standalone compact player” a little and we can probably help. Does the client want something that they can click and the file will automatically play from a specific player module?
If so, a flash file with a custom player skin would be the best bet. I believe you can take a flash video file and make it into an executable projector file that has an .exe extenstion. So when you click on it, it automatically opens and plays. The projector conversion embeds the player functionality into the file I believe.
You also don’t have to outlay the expense for the full-blown Adobe Flash software. There are companines that make apps that will convert a flash video with skin into a projector file. I have no idea how well they work (or don’t work), but we did the reverse recently with a $29 program where we took a client’s projector file of a video (the company that produced it was out of business), and converted it to a .swf file.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Another consideration is that external drives and network based storage appliances below $1000 have a pretty dismal failure rate. In the last year alone we’ve had half a dozen external drives fail (some less than a year old), and one network attached unit flake out so badly it had to be reformatted and only some of the data could be salvaged (using Hiren Boot CD and Knoppix).
So you don’t want to skimp on your backup system…or if you do, backup onto two different drives so you have a fail-safe in case one of them fails.
Our shared video/audio storage is Raid 5, which is capable of recovery if one drive in the raid fails, and we have a LaCie 4GB network drive that was $2000 from B&H Photo that incrementally backs up everything nightly.
If we’re doing a project that has a really tight deadline, we’ll even backup those project files and video/audio files to one of our direct attached external units just as a precaution. Call me anal, but I don’t like re-doing something I’ve spent a month working on!
Just think how long it would take you to rebuild the stuff you’re going to be storing on these, not to mention the embarrassment and heartache it would cause with clients, employees etc.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Does the project video have audio? That’s a very obscure request. I’ve only heard of one application or encoder that uses MP4 ES and that’s 3ivx. There could be more but I couldn’t find any when doing searches for MP4 Elementary Stream on Google.
We don’t do Do Blu-Ray authoring, but I guess in theory if you use AVC compression (H264) it might use an MP4 elementary stream and mux it with the accompanying audio file???
I stumbled across 3ivs a while back doing research for an email newsletter we sent out about alternative media players. Seems they have an encoder that encodes the video as an M4V ES, and the audio as AAC then muxes them together in any number of wrappers like AVI, ASF, Quicktime etc.
Here’s a link:
I’d ask your client to confirm this is what they want. We’ve had clients make weird requests before and 9 times out of 10 it wasn’t REALLY want they wanted or needed.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
H264 is going to give you the best quality at the lowest bit-rate and file size.
Next would be 4:2:2 MPG2 (DVD quality except it doesn’t throw out half the color info). After that, 4:2:0 MPG2 (DVD quality) at a fairly high bitrate (8-10MB/sec) would also look very good.
Without knowing your format specs (I’m assuming it’s HD if 4 seconds uncompressed is 219 MB), you need to keep in mind there are different specs for Blu-ray compression and standard definition DVDs.
Your target playback device will ultimately determine which codec you should use. But all things equal, you cannot beat the quality of H264/MPG4.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
If you keep the pixel size, aspect and frame rate the same, theoretically it should look fine. If all those are correct, the only thing that typically causes a stutter is having the field order reversed. So if you’re using upper field first, try swapping to lower field first.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
No offense intended here…but if you’re starting a production company and don’t have a detailed list of equipment specs and know where to look for equipment, you might want to find someone locally to help you.
Unless of course you plan to rent a lot of stuff outside what you own for projects. When we opened our company 13 years ago, we started pretty basic, but we still spent over $125,000 on equipment. There were just 2 of us and we had 1 NLE system and one shooting package (BetaSP with 2 small light kits (Arri and Lowell), shotgun, boom pole and basket, wireless kit, 2 wired lavs, gels, diffusion, electrical cabling, video/audio cabling, a connector kit (for changing male to female on most cables or changing say xlr to 1/4″), tripod and head, hand-made gobos and maybe a few other grip accessories bought at Home Depot. It didn’t take long to realize, “we gotta get some more equipment!” Things like C-stands, sandbags, multi-tap electrical cables, 220 to 110 turnarounds, DC to AC inverters, diffusion panels and frames, flags and frames etc. I could go on for 2 more paragraphs.
Anyway…I don’t think you can beat B&H for service and rarely on price…BUT…you have to know what you want or it’s easy to buy something and realize once you get it that it’s not exactly what you needed.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
There’s an earlier post from just a couple of days ago about this issue. It has to do with gamma/color shifts caused by a bug in Quicktime. There are some workarounds. Read through the posts from the last 2 or 3 days and you should find them.
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/20/861730
https://forums.creativecow.net/readpost/20/861731
The easiest one we’ve found is to NOT use quicktime as the container for the H264 file. So if you have access to an encoder that will simply export an H264/MP4 file, the issue is greatly minimized. Also using an atlternative H264 codec from the one supplied with Quicktime is supposed to fix it, but I haven’t personally tried it.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
We’ve minimized it by using H264 export and outputting as an MP4 file. The colors look much more accurate to the original than if we use Quicktime and H264. The resulting MP4 will play in Quicktime, Flash and and Windows Media player (with the right codecs loaded).
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
All good advice. Except I subscribe to the philosophy that if an email is longer than 3 sentences or asks for an answer to more than 1 question, most of your recipients don’t read beyond the that first point or question.
We regularly send emails to clients asking 2 or 3 numbered questions. 8 emails and three days later we might have our questions answered. As my partner says to all the employees in our office that just LOVE the anonymity and lack of accountability that e-mail affords: “pick up the damn phone and call them!”
I find that many people have the attitude that “hey, I’ve sent an email, I’ve covered my ass, now the issue is in the other person’s court.” They don’t consider that maybe the other person is in meetings all day without access to email, or that perhaps the email was filtered and never received. That good old-fashioned telephone is still a wonderful office tool!
I admit…I LOVE email because it forces me to “think” through my follow-up notes to meetings (which I always send following client meetings); it forces me to read and re-read shot lists and shooting schedules; and the biggie, it leaves a glorious paper trail that no-one can dispute when something goes wrong and blame starts getting thrown around like mud slung in a pig pen.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com -
Isn’t there a preset to convert it to blu-ray HD progressive instead of the 1080i? As Daniel points out there’s no reason to go to interlaced in the MPG2 Blu-Ray from the progressive AVCHD.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com