[Daniel Low]

You can’t do 50Mb/s iframe only in compressor. I believe you can with Episode pro

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Sent from my iPad Nano.

[Daniel Low]

Not sure then unless you’re not using square pixels on your output.

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Sent from my iPad Nano.

[Daniel Low]

[Jason Brown] “I have a fair knowledge…I’ve been authoring/encoding for about 5-6 years, so I’m not a noob to this”

Then you should know that when targeting VBR, your peak rate should be set to be roughly double your average rate.

Can you post comparison screen grabs of the output from each application?

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[Daniel Low]

What frame size does it report in the Quicktime player?

Get that info by pressing the Apple Key and ‘I’

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[Daniel Low]

[Jason Brown] “I’m doing a bit-rate as variable 7mbps…with a limit of 7.8…I’ve played with several settings and tweaked them”

There are a lot more setting we’d need to know about before being able to track down the problem you are having. There is no reason why Squeeze or episode should look significantly better than compressor.

Have you tried using one of the Apple supplied presets and not messing with it?

You might want to try switching to CBR @ 7Mb/s as well. VBR works best where there’s much more of a variable between average and max, in your case you might see a much better transcode is you went for an average of 3.5Mb/s and a limit 7.8Mb/s

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[Daniel Low]

You might have cropped to 1024×720 but are you displaying (playing) it at 1024×720?

In other words have you resized your output frame to match your crop?

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[Daniel Low]

Adobe use very high quality source – what’s your source format?

The camera is on a tripod most of the time and there’s very little movement. Is that the same with your content?

They use professional lighting. Do you?

They experiment with transcode settings to get exactly the right ones, have you? or are you just using the presets in Squeeze?

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[Daniel Low]

I’d set up a playlist with VLC, control it with VLC remote in the iPhone.

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[Daniel Low]

But wait, if the PC guy has Quicktime installed, why bother with AVI!!??? FFS!!!

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[Daniel Low]

Usually an AVI is either uncompressed, hardware based or most likely DivX.

Whatever, AVI is best avoided.

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Sent from my iPad Nano.