Ed Dooley
Forum Replies Created
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Our biggest problem with QT (and Flash for that matter) has been corporate IT people not allowing employees to install *anything* on their desktops. WMV9 has been the mainstay in those situations.
As for Flash quality, what about those amazing network Flash episodes? I think they look amazing, and I wish I could get my stuff to look like that (what? they spend thousands on lighting and they have better cameras? oh).
Walter, have you considered putting your H.264s in Flash yet, or are you waiting, as I am, for better Flash 9 penetration first?
Ed -
We now typically export a self-contained QT using Current Settings, and compress to a data rate usually around 700kbs total (650 for video and 50 for audio). Size is often 480×360 or 480×270 for 16:9 (no flames for the 16 pixel thing please!).
Ed -
Have to agree with Sean and Chris. Walter, what are you smoking? 🙂
Flash is terrible for video? Remember all those people who would say “I made
a QuickTime and it looks terrible”? And the standard reply was that QuickTime is
a wrapper and that there were different codecs you could choose, and if you chose the
Sorenson SV3Pro, the QT will look its best. It’s the same thing with Flash, it’s many things,
it’s Spark, it’s ON2VP6, and now it’s H.264. To say Flash is terrible for video is also saying
that H.264 is terrible for video (and I don’t think you believe that…. or do you?).
We haven’t started using H.264 for our Flash encodes yet, but do use it for QTs (the same exact file
can be both) and they look great.
Ed -
And since we’re fessing up here, I guess I should say that my point was, if you still have to do a film transfer, why not bring it in 16:9? I guess you could argue that since it’s close to 4:3 already (1.37:1), why not transfer to 4:3 then if you wanted a 16:9 from that you could crop, but………. it depends on how it was shot. Because a filmmaker might know that the film will be projected at 1.85:1 or wider, they might not worry too much about lights and booms in the frame. They also often assume a lot of the top will be cut off so there’s an awful lot of headroom above, er… heads in the shot. Of course, a transfer for 4:3 TV *does* take that into account by cropping a bit on top, bottom, and sides of a frame.
And you did say that the reason it wouldn’t be widescreen was because it was 4:3 material. I think I would check to see if your client wants it to be widescreen (16:9) because you definitely can give it to them.
Ed -
A couple of questions:
-How did you arrive at that size? It’s kind of an odd one. Most video encoding works best if the dimensions are divisible by 16.
-Why did you choose that data rate? If you know your audience and you think that restriction is necessary, so be it. But if you think your audience are on broadband, then you should safely be able to increase data rate to 700kbps, a big improvement in quality.
-ON2VP6 is pretty good, but do you need it? Now that the latest version of Flash supports H.264 you could use that. The only issue is that viewers need the latest Flash player to see it. It’s the “audience” part again. If you have an audience that keeps up with the latest player updates, you’re fine, if not, they’ll get an update message. If that’s OK with you, you could go H.264 in Flash. If you have corporate viewers who may be restricted by their IT people from updating, they may be behind the times a bit. In which case ON2 would make more sense.
-Do you need that many key frames? That will give you a marker every 2 seconds. Do you need viewers to navigate that precisely? If not, you could increase that number so it hits maybe every 5 seconds or so.
Ed -
One way is to go into the Motion tab and select the scale as 100%, then you can set keyframes to move the image around.
Ed -
Mmmmm, which is it, yet-to-be-transferred film footage or 4:3? If it hasn’t been transferred yet, why won’t it be 16:9? And think about future uses, if it’s SD now, will it be HD in the future? If so, and you don’t have super, super fast drives, going with DVCPro (HD!) is a good path. Have it transferred to DVCPro100, edit it, and then go to SD from there.
Ed[Jiri Fiala] “Most of the materials to be used in this documentary is on film reels, 16MMs and 35MMs. Transfer to an editable format will be carried by a pro house (not picked yet).”
[Jiri Fiala] “h silly me 🙂 The sole delivery format will be SD PAL DVD, I’m almost sure it won’t be widescreen because majority of footage is 4:3.
I edit on FCP on Intel iMac 2,13 GHz, which should be sufficient for SD. There is a possibility of a sponsored quad-mac pro with RAID array (which will be required anyway, right?). FCS 2.
So, you think that the codec of choice should be DVCPRO PAL?
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Sure, do a search of forums and you’ll find hundreds of posts answering the same question, with a whole lot of sites for music.
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Well, you don’t say what you’ll be delivering, SD or HD. You don’t say what your system is, hoiw fast, or what storage you have. All important points in deciding what format/codec to use. It could go all the way from DV50 to Uncompressed 1080P. Tell us more about the final use.
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Or put a “DRAFT” text layer over the video every minute or 2.
Ed