Dorian Gray
Forum Replies Created
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Apple Motion JPEG B, with the MPEG Streamclip quality slider set to 100% (lossless), is perhaps your best bet for an intermediate codec. This is true for nearly all video destined for web or DVD. It’s pretty fast and offers good compression, while maintaining lossless quality in most workflows (including the one you mentioned). It also comes with QuickTime, so it’s “free”. You’ll need a decent amount of free disk space of course.
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I’m on the Mac and haven’t used Cleaner XL so not sure what its capabilities are, but if it can’t export a progressive-scan H.264 file from your source video (as opposed to producing one, but with poor quality) there may be something else wrong that would prevent other encoders from working too. To make sure Cleaner XL isn’t having a problem with the Animation codec, you could try converting it to another QuickTime codec such as Motion JPEG A or B at the “Best” quality setting (lossless), PNG, or “None” if you have plenty of temporary disk space. Then try opening the resulting MOV in Cleaner XL and exporting to H.264. It’s a long shot, but it may be worth trying before giving up on Cleaner XL.
QuickTime Pro 7 has a surprisingly good H.264 encoder built in, and it’s very affordable if you don’t yet have it, but H.264 may not be the best option in your case anyway. If the Dell has 100BASE-T Ethernet or better (Gigabit Ethernet), which it almost certainly will, you’ll have enough bandwidth to use MPEG-2 with even full HD material. That would pretty much guarantee the Dell hardware would play it back without a glitch, unless it’s truly ancient, and it will be quicker for you to encode too (though this may not matter so much). Video quality with MPEG-2 should be first-class at a decent bitrate. Sorenson Squeeze 4 has a fairly good MPEG-2 encoder, so I would try that first. Give it plenty of bitrate.
Very nice work on your site by the way! Sorry I can’t be of more use; hopefully someone else will comment.
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If this is from your own computer, and you’ve got fast disks, why not play the QT Animation directly? If that’s not an option, H.264 is probably the best delivery codec available by quality-to-size ratio, but it requires a hefty computer for playback of HD material (a dual-G5 or equivalent should handle it fine though). QuickTime Pro (version 7) comes with an H.264 encoder that delivers fine quality but takes even longer to encode than other H.264 codecs.
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The previous posters have basically summed it up, but I thought I’d emphasise that QuickTime’s MPEG-4 export quality is truly woeful compared to Sorenson Squeeze or Popwire’s Compression Master (which both do excellent MPEG-4 SP/ASP and very good H.264). QuickTime 7 exports lovely H.264, roughly comparable to other good H.264 codecs, but QuickTime 6 doesn’t do H.264 of course. There really isn’t a world-class delivery codec option in QuickTime 6, unfortunately.
If your content is compelling, I feel many people would download QuickTime 7 if you give them a link and a brief explanatory note (it seems likely that most Mac users and many Windows users have moved to QuickTime 7 by now anyway). You could then offer a delicious H.264 MOV as well as a WMV (check out Popwire’s WMV-9 Component: it’s been recently upgraded but it’s still cheaper than Flip4Mac’s option). These options (QuickTIme H.264 and Flip4Mac/Popwire WMV) would cost a lot less than a dedicated professional encoder such as Squeeze or CM, and may well give perfectly acceptable quality. The Popwire and Flip4Mac QuickTime components are available for trial, and you can take it from me that QuickTime 7’s H.264 is excellent.
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HandBrake is a remarkably easy-to-use app for doing this, suitable for MPEG-4 output (including H.264 if you wish) in either the MP4 or AVI container. Do a two-pass encode with file size set to 700 MB and burn the resulting file to CD; should work nicely.