[Jeff Greenberg]

[Stanya Kahn] “-Should I convert each video to PAL separately? (was planning to use CinemaTools per the recommendation of another thread)”

Hmm. This will work fine from the 23.98 material (it’ll be a slight speed up) but not great for the 29.97 material (a huge slow down.)
You might want handle one/both to compressor and let it do a frame rate conversion.

[Stanya Kahn] “Or put them into one file and then convert? “

Handle them separately – they’re two different frame rates.

[Stanya Kahn] “-Should the SD 29.97 piece be converted to 23.98 first? (as per another thread)? Or not? “
Why would you want to convert 29.97 to 23.98 to 25. Doesn’t it make more sense just to go to 25fps?

[Stanya Kahn] “-additionally, should I upres the SD first? Or let the HD vid downsize with anamorphic bars? “

The delivery is DVD. SD. Upconverting it to downconverting it is a waste of your time.

[Stanya Kahn] “I have to make an SD DVD to play on a PAL DVD deck. “

Call them. See if you can ship them an NTSC DVD for playback. Yes, seriously. Most PAL players will playback an NTSC DVD just fine. You may not have to jump through any of these hoops.

Best,

Jeff I. Greenberg
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[Jeff Greenberg]

Sreekuma – it’s because he has Perian installed.

Chris, I’d suggest just getting the h.264 content out of the mkv container. There’s a utility I haven’t used in a while called MKVtools (and MP4 tools) that should let you copy the h.264 into a different container (rather than re-encoding it.)

MPEG Streamclip is using Perian (built on FFMPEG) to handle the media. The problem is that Perian is dead…and the MKV container wasn’t ever really meant for anything other than distribution.

>Is it a timecode or drop frame issue?

Perhaps – the person who encoded it (or their encoder) may have incorrectly encoded the frame rate. And it’s the frame rate interpretation that’s an issue (I believe). An easy way to test it would be to take a section and output it as a series of stills. Depending on what happens you can tell if it’s duplicating frames.

So, I’ll ask: where did you get the MKV files, can you get the originals and what was the original encoder software?

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Jeff I. Greenberg
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[Jeff Greenberg]

Bill,

I don’t think that adding keyframes will help. The right answer here is that GoDaddy is recompressing your video.

If it looks good on your system, but looks lousy after it’s been handled by Godaddy, it something they’re doing on their end.

Dissolves are difficult to compress (and in your case, godaddy is recompressing again.) The reason? Codecs like h.264 only send a full frame (keyframe) every 5-10 seconds (yes, this can be changed) and then send only the pixels that update.

But that dissolve? Every pixel is being changed; which requires a higher data rate.

And the compression of compressed material? Makes it even harder.

So, just as a suggestion for your own sanity, what do you think of uploading it to youtube and embedding it into your webpage that you’re hosting at Godaddy. This way, your video is no longer limited to 150 mb, you have Youtube which (arguable) handles more video than anyone else.

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Jeff I. Greenberg
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[Jeff Greenberg]

That option has to do with the format of the drives.

It’s present in HFS+; not there in NTFS, FAT32, exFat.

Are all the drives HFS+?

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Jeff I. Greenberg
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[Jeff Greenberg]

No, there isn’t an easy way to segment a 16 gig file into pieces. Can I do it? Yes, you can actually use a utility to split it into multiple files and reconstruct it on the other end. You don’t want to deal with this.

It’d be easier to grab a 32 gig flash drive and send them that instead of the DVDs.

I looked at the data rate you must have used (and h.264 around 19mb/s) and you *could* go back to the original and recompress it so you get 2 hrs as an h.264 file – around 8-9 mb/s (very watchable, still larger than youtube’s data rate) you’ll get a file that fits onto a DVD-9; but again, I’d suggest a flash drive over it.

Best,

Jeff I. Greenberg
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[Jeff Greenberg]

DNxHD is very finicky – you have to correctly match frame size with frame rate for the specific DNxHD codec – 145 must be 1080i material and not 23.98p.

That’s about 99% of DNxHD/QT problems right there.

Best,

Jeff I. Greenberg
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[Jeff Greenberg]

Click on the drive itself.

Choose Get info.

Unlock the drive.

Choose “Ignore Permissions on this Volume”

If the drives aren’t having a problem on a different mac, it’s likely a problem with your system itself.

[Jeff Greenberg]

The easiest way you can check everything is to bring your drives to another mac.

Did you check the Main Drive permission (as I suggested) on OSX – to bypass it entirely?

I have here (connect via Tbolt & USB 2/3) some 1/2 dozen drives – none of which exhibit this behavior.

You might consider installing mountain lion on a different HD and see if it still has this issue.

Best,

Jeff I. Greenberg
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[Jeff Greenberg]

[Tom Laughlin] “Yea, I noticed that when you switch from the codec “MainConcept H.264” to the “x.264” at the top of the Squeeze interface, the list of ‘specs to change’ changes in the window, and there are different prefs, some are there and are similar, but with the x.264 window, not all the prefs to change are there in the MC H.264 drop-down menu.
“

This is because Squeeze has 3 different (really 4) different h.264 encoders; each have different capabilities – all will encode a h.264 viable file.
Sorenson has their own encoder that they built
Main Concepts is the one they licensed (that most of the other software – Episode & Adobe Media Encoder happen to use.)
They also are using the open source x264 implementation.

99% sure you don’t *really* need to work about 99% of those switches (that’s why there’s the Simple/Advanced) settings. OTOH I totally respect the desire to educate yourself as fully as possible.

Your original post said:
480×270 (16×9)
Bit-rate: 700kbps
Max file-size: 500 MB

Well, at that size (which should be okay-ish for h.264, you can get about 100 minutes of footage.
Not happy with it? As you increase the bit rate you get a larger file…and if you limit it to 500 megs, you get less minutes.

90% of quality is going to be the data rate.

SD: 640×360 @ 1000kbs is a good place to start.
As you reduce the file size, you can reduce the data rate.
If you reduce the FPS (to 2:1) you can cut the data rate in half.

A better question (one I think I asked in my first reply) was: how long is the video? Based on that, we can talk about increasing the data rate.

[Jeff Greenberg]

Tom,

You’d mentioned x264, and right now at the top you have the MainConcepts h264 compressor chosen.

When you switch it to x264, it’ll reveal (under advanced) the CABAC choice – which is more complex, and may help the encode a bit.

Best,

Jeff I. Greenberg
Author/Master Instructor/Speaker/Consulting
My contact info and more
New! Come see me speak @ NAB/Post Production World!