[Daniel Low]

You’ll get MUCH better results from H.264 at the same bitrates, or the same quality at roughly half the bitrate compared to MPEG-2. It all depends what you what to do with your output.

Check out slides 18-20 in this PPT/PDF

https://video.ldc.lu.se/pict/WM9V-MP4AVC-MP2V_comparison-Goldman.pdf

[Daniel Low]

There isn’t any one thing that’ll do exactly what you want. You’ll need to either employ a couple of different applications and do a fair amount of manual work or get a developer to write a custom script or app that will be able to control a 3rd party tool.

There are many possible routes to a solution, it depends on the kit you have available to you and / or what sort of budget you have to buy in new stuff and possibly get a script or dev guy to figure the rest out for you.

_DL_

[Daniel Low]

A DV or HDV video camera.
A PC or a Mac with loads of RAM.
A big hard drive.
And something like Adobe Premiere or the totally brilliant and free iMovie, which comes free with Macs.

I learn’t on a Mac so my preference would be for that platform, additionally moving up to, learning and knowing Final Cut Pro would be a major benefit – Final Cut Pro is becomming one of the most popular editing packages out there in the real world, although Premiere or Vegas are still wonderfully capable and powerful.

[Daniel Low]

That’s more like it – there’s now some meat on your bone!

The standard settings default to a resize interpolation method of ‘Automatic’, you might want to change that to bicubic and have your Interlace options set to Progressive output

You will also want to add a deinterlace step, and experiment with various ways of creating new fields, I suggest an interpolation method, others get great results from blending.

I’ve not seen your source, so the above is subject to that being right and exact!

D

[Daniel Low]

What templates are you working with?

Generally though:

Increase the bitrate and/or add more forced keyframes.

[Daniel Low]

Obviously cropping just the sides and not top or bottom will result in distorting the picture. Make sure any cropping maintains the correct frame aspect ratio. (Yours is already too wide)

[Daniel Low]

I’d use PhotoJPEG for archive.

For encoding I’d recommend Episode from Telestream (the Flip4mac guys)

[Daniel Low]

I’d suggest using a correct 4:3 (or 16:9) frame size such as 480×360. Crop your source – getting rid of uneven lines around the edge of the frame and letterboxing, apply some colour correction (it’s too dark generally as well as washed out in the whites). As 90% of the clip was letterboxed 16:9 – why not just serve it as 16:9?

I’d also question the mashup of 4:3 & 16:9 where transitions are happening over the letterboxing, but that’s asthetics more than video compression quality.

DL

[Daniel Low]

Seriously, I have ALWAYS had my problems solved quickly by calling Apple tech support or the reseller I bought through..

[Daniel Low]

What’s a Zune? 😉