[Daniel Low]

Chris, are you just teasing me?

“Several of those I listed are cross-platform and will also play Flash”

You listed 7 players in total, 3 are cross platform.

“On the gamma thing. Carbon Coder has options for selecting gamma correction on probably half it’s HUGE list of export options“.

Gamma is a preprocessing filter and as such can be applied to any target (or indeed source), not half of them. In reality however you’d only want to apply it to web targets or specific devices.

That said, you are missing my point.

If you are delivering to a typical audience on the web, then 90% of them will be using windows and 8% Mac, on average. If you author on PC, it does not make sense to Gamma adjust for that 8%.

Everything these days should be done, and in my experience is being done and delivered at a Gamma of 2.2

I deal with encoding farms processing well over 1000 hours of content a day, which is then delivered to a variety of platforms and devices internationally. Gamma is 2.2 for everything.

Your mileage may vary.

P.S. – I notice the videos on your website have a frame size of 320×235, I’m curious as to how you came by such an odd frame size?

You may find this useful for finding a correct size:

https://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/apps/flv_bitrate_calculator/video_sizes.html

__________________________________________________________________
Fonts are like cologne:

A bad choice speaks louder than a good one.

[Daniel Low]

On the Mac is has to be Episode, on the PC certainly Carbon Coder or Procoder.

__________________________________________________________________
Fonts are like cologne:

A bad choice speaks louder than a good one.

[Daniel Low]

720×540 PAL MPEG-2?

No. Wrong. There is no PAL frame size of 720×540.

You might have material at this frame size and at 25fps but it’s wrong. What is telling you it’s that size? Quicktime player?

Stick with Episode. It’s one of the best out there. You’ll need to spend $80k before you’ll get anything significantly better.

__________________________________________________________________
Fonts are like cologne:

A bad choice speaks louder than a good one.

[Daniel Low]

“It seems like when I upload a full 720×480 clip, it takes forever to upload and become available”

Nothing unusual about that.

Have you any idea about the volume of transcodes Youtube is doing on a daily basis? Think of a number and multiply it by 1000 and you’re still not anywhere near close.

Then remind yourself that it’s a free service.

__________________________________________________________________
Fonts are like cologne:

A bad choice speaks louder than a good one.

[Daniel Low]

What are you using to view the m2v?

__________________________________________________________________
Fonts are like cologne:

A bad choice speaks louder than a good one.

[Daniel Low]

Episode has a bunch of presets for Standards conversion, have you tried these?

720×480
Maintain proportions with None (Distort)
Source Display Aspect ratio – Pass through or force it by using ‘assume’

__________________________________________________________________
Fonts are like cologne:

A bad choice speaks louder than a good one.

[Daniel Low]

Not quite:

Traditionally Mac defaulted to 1.8 (the ideal Gamma setting) and Windows it’s undefined but anything between 2.2 to 2.5 – assume 2.2. The ideal Gamma is at 1.8 as it has near perfect uniformity but most of the worlds computers are running windows so…go figure!

So, two sides to the above;

Pro photographers and those working in print have known for a while now to calibrate Macs to 2.2/D65. In fact Apple cinema displays have been set to 2.2 for a while.

Regarding video, you’ll find that modern codecs auto correct for Gamma across platforms and devices.

There is however a bug with Quicktime H.264 that exhibits an annoying gamma shift.

As for players, there simply no need for anything other than Quicktime with Perian alongside VLC, between the two you have everything covered. I don’t recommend players to clients that aren’t cross platform. When I’m on a PC I use VLC 99% of the time.

__________________________________________________________________
Fonts are like cologne:

A bad choice speaks louder than a good one.

[Daniel Low]

I’ll second what Craig says, Episode is one of the best applications out there, better than solutions costing 10x as much.

That said you can still get respectable output from F4M without trying too hard.

__________________________________________________________________
Fonts are like cologne:

A bad choice speaks louder than a good one.

[Daniel Low]

There’s no reason to need anything other than what you’ll get out of Episode, if you do then your client is being particularly difficult!

If you get to that point, it’s likely you’ll need to move over to Windows as that’s where most of the other solution lie.

__________________________________________________________________
Fonts are like cologne:

A bad choice speaks louder than a good one.

[Daniel Low]

I’d just open them up in Quicktime Pro and export them as an uncompressed .mov. You don’t need compressor in this instance.

__________________________________________________________________
Fonts are like cologne:

A bad choice speaks louder than a good one.