Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
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Not sure I’m following. From my experience with MPEG Streamclip, and according to their website, it cannot export a file to windows media format.
The text below is copy/pasted directly from their site’s description of the Mac version:
MPEG Streamclip can export formats to QuickTime, DV/DV50, AVI/DivX and MPEG-4 with high quality encoding and even uncompressed or HD video
It can import and play wmv files, but not export. I have a copy of the windows version on this PC and I just tried to it…no dice.
On the framerate issue, if you set a frame rate, your export shouldn’t drop frames during sequences with motion. Are you sure that’s what’s happening? Bottom line, we need more specific and accurate information about your settings and what format you’re exorting to.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
Both videos looked fantastic played on YouTube from where I’m sitting. No color loss, virtually no compression articfacts. There was some softening but that’s to be expected.
I’m not seeing what you’re describing. Are you sure you don’t have some low quality setting turned on in YouTube or have an old, outdated version of Flash Player installed for your browser?
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
Your links go to creative cow pages, not to videos. But generally, the only thing you can do to improve YouTube quality is give them extremely high-quality source files. Virtually everything uploaded to YouTube will get re-encoded. They process tens if not hundreds of thousands of video files each day and I can assure you their encoding is automated and likely doesn’t examine each file to determine whether it needs to be re-encoded or not.
YouTube will accept almost any file-format/codec combination and I believe accepts files as large as 2GB. I personally think it’s overkill to give them files that large, but it does help to give them source files in their native resolution compressed at high quality, say with mp4 or MPEG2.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
This won’t fix your issue but Adobe Media Encoder is generally considered to be a pretty poor encoding application…often producing just plain weird results. We’ve never gotten it to work properly through many, many Adobe versions with Premiere and AE.
My suggestion is to use the freebie Handbrake to make your mp4 files. It’s excellent, is fairly easy to use and best of all…is free and available for every major computer platform.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
Converting to ProRes is pretty common for editing…but in this case I’m not sure you gained anything by going to ProRes, then down to DV for delivery. I’m not sure how it would have had any negative impact on transitions or standard effects. Now if you’re doing compositing and layering, certainly going to ProRes for editing makes more sense.
Very few people edit in H.264..mainly because NLE systems generally struggle with deoding it and playing it back….and since it’s designed as a delivery format and not a production codec, quality would definitely suffer during rending of effects and compositing.
In terms of delivering in whatever you wanted. It really depends on the medium you’re delivering to. If it’s broadcast, almost all of them now prefer delivery as MPEG2 or H.264, so you’d be going back to the basic format you acquired in. If it was for a film festival, you’re going to have to adhere to their requirements, which I’m sure are probably similar to broadcasters since the goal of most is to keep the file sizes manageable, but the visual quality high, and MPEG2, H.264 and VC-1 are the three codecs that do that very well.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
As far as any issues in converting, there really shouldn’t be any. All the stuff we’ve gotten from the 5D has been standard quicktime files using H.264, which convert easily in most modern encoding applications. You may want to ask about 16:9 to 4:3….unless they’re going to be editing in 16:9 using DV. If they’re editing 4:3 you’re going to have to lose 17% of your image on each side, or letterbox down into the 4:3 frame.
As for the choice to go down to DV…all I can say is “ick.” We’ve received some footage shot on the 5D by outside production houses and I’ve been disappointed at how compressed the video is coming out of it. All the footage we’ve received has been very grainy with a lot of noticeable compression artifacts. Everyone that has seen it has commented on these issues.
Bumping it down further to DV is going to degrade it even more.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
I don’t doubt Bob’s recommendation or that SNS is a good solution too… but I can tell you from experience that Apace is also a great solution for GB shared video storage. We run one of their vStor systems with 4 edit seats and it’s literally been running non-stop for 2 and half years without a second of downtime and about 30 minutes (total) of administration time from me….and that was to resize the volumes a couple of times (which you can do “on the fly”) and to routinely check the drives status. We get multi-channel real-time playback of SD video and a few channels of real-time compressed HD playback(cineform codec). It will handle uncompressed SD too but only a few channels in real-time.
Their customer support is also the best I’ve ever experienced in 25 years in this business. Our reseller was IEEE in California, who was also excellent. Dennis Bress is the contact there.
https://www.ieei.com/videostorage1/vstor.shtml
It’s worth it to compare solutions to make sure you’re getting what you need. The engineers at Apace also understand video better than anyone else I spoke with while I was researching systems back in 2008.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
I’m not too sure about compressor since I’m on a PC, but I know many encoding applications and MPEG2 codecs will spit out a muxed MPEG2 file with PCM (uncompressed) audio. Is there an option to use PCM? As far as I know it’s uncompressed.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
The downside to using services like Extreme Reach and DG is that it’s more expensive and adds more encoding passes and administrative work to the process.
If you encode and deliver via FTP yourself…it basically involves 2 steps (encoding and uploading) and you charge your client accordingly. If you involve Extreme Reach, DG, Vyvx or others, you still do those first two steps (and charge for it), but your spot will then likely get re-encoded and resent, or worse, it could get dumped to analogue tape then shipped in tape format. Quality DOES suffer from our experience with these services.
Plus, you’ll charge your client your fee, and then have to charge the digital delivery services fee, which is typically $25-$35 per spot….and you’ll want to mark that up because you (or someone in your company) WILL spend precious time doing administrative work communicating with the digital service, going over billing etc.
We’ve had loads of billing issues with a couple of these services that ranged from minor annoyances to utter disasters…with rampant overbilling and general incompetence on the part of one of these services (that shall remain nameless). For my money…if you can keep it in-house and handle the technical requirements, that’s the way to go.
The only time these services make sense is when you have a few spots that need to go to many, many locations…like when a client buys local affiliates or cable in many different markets. In that case, it’s more economical and efficient than sending yourself.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
You need to provide a LOT more info. Read the top post on the main screen of the compression forum and provide some more detailed specs on what all you’re doing, from the specs of the original files to the export settings, codecs and compression program you’re using.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog