Ed Dooley
Forum Replies Created
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What are you viewing it on, your computer monitor, or a real video monitor?
Ed -
That’s your problem. You have to view it on a video monitor to see what it really looks like. It’s probably fine, but you won’t know till you view it properly.
Ed -
How are you looking at it, on your computer monitor, or through a card or box (like an AJA IO etc.) into a video monitor?
Ed -
You’re not doing anything wrong. It’s a well known, and very frustrating problem. Do a search for “gamma shift H.264” in this and other forums and you’ll get hundreds of hits, and a few workarounds.
Nothing seems to work in all situations though (maybe using the x.264 codec instead of H.264, do a search for that too).
Ed -
It’s funny you mention the WM9 looking better. I just had this same discussion with someone when I posted a WM9 and H.264 version of a project. I thought the WM9 looked better than the H.264, she thought the opposite. I think you’ve made a good choice. I might look at the data-rate on the high quality one to see if you can lower it even more (as a test to see if it still looks good at, say 3,000-4,000). WM9 is compatible back to 6.4 (with some exceptions), so you should be covered as far as market penetration. 🙂
Ed -
I repeat, Cut Studio 4, you didn’t get the press release?
Appledobe sent it on Friday.
Ed[Shane Ross] “that is waaaaaaaay into the future. We are on Cut Studio 2”
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Cut Studio 4
Ed
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1. Go straight from UC8bit to FLV
2. It depends on what you’re compressing to. You’ll get great quality and smaller file size going with H.264 rather than ON2VP6. You can now put H.264 in a Flash wrapper for viewers with Flash9 Update3 or later to view. For ON2VP6 FLVs, Episode, FlixPro: https://www.on2.com/index.php?365, Squeeze, or the Flash Encoder work. I think all but the Flash Encoder do 2 pass encoding for the highest quality (but be aware that some Flash upload sites don’t allow 2 pass VBR Flash). If you can go H.264, then Compressor, Episode, QT Pro, and Squeeze all work. I personally use and like Episode, although I use Compressor for H.264 too.
3. Video for encoding likes to be in blocks of 8 or 16 pixels ideally. Here’s an Adobe chart for Flash optimal sizes. Your frame size isn’t here, but do the math, I think you’ll see that your size isn’t ideal. Maybe you can crop a few pixels?https://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/apps/flv_bitrate_calculator/video_sizes.html
Ed
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I thought I was being clear, but I guess not. If you don’t put the H.264 in a Flash wrapper, you need QT installed (not everyone with a PC has QT installed, either by choice or corporate edict). You will be able to, in the future, play straight H.264 in Windows Media Player (without installing your own codec). If you have it in a Flash wrapper, you need at least Flash 9, Update 3. And contrary to your reports of market penetration, Flash 9 Update 3 is not on 97% of computers in mature markets (the Adobe reports says Flash 9, which includes the all versions, including the 1st version). I have my doubts about all versions of Flash 9 even having that much market penetration, but Update 3 definitely doesn’t, and Adobe and independents don’t think so either. Some reports say Flash 9 Update 3 has 80% penetration, and that may be fine for his audience, I can’t afford to have 2 out of 10 people not be able to see our videos, we’d get a lot of complaints.
If his audience is young, iTunes, Flash movie-watching hip people, I’d suggest H.264. If his audience is corporate, I’d suggest ON2VP6 Flash, which still looks very good BTW. It compares to H.264, is less processor intensive, and compresses faster.
Ed -
What I meant about needing to install QT or have iTunes (which installs QT), is to play H.264 in QT, not Flash.
You can’t just have Flash on your system to play H.264, it needs (as you said) to be in a Flash wrapper, so it’s useless by itself without QT installed. I also said you needed a later version of Flash 9 (it’s Update 3) or Flash 10. And not everyone is allowed to update Flash on their computers, it’s a common problem for my clients in corporations; the IT department doesn’t allow users to download updates to their own computers. I have a number of clients with Flash 8 on their corporate PCs.
There are ways to play H.264 in Windows Media Player (I think it’s FFD Show, or something like that) to play it in WMP10 or 11), but you don’t want to be asking your viewers to find and install something to be able to play H.264. WMP12 will have built in support for H.264, I think.
Ed