[Jim Brodie]

Hi Floh,

Thank you for your quick response!!!

Would you recommend 24 gigs of RAM and what brand of SSD drive would you go with? I’ve heard there are high failure rates with some of these drives lately.

Also, I’m thinking of staying in OS 10.6.8 for now. I’m right in the middle of a large project.

Does the older version Mac Pro 4.1 run 64 bit programs efficiently?

All the Best,

Jim

[Jim Brodie]

Joseph,

Thank you for your detailed comment. Some of my clients have awful laptops that they never do any maintenance on and I had to give them 5 mbps 960 x 540 files and they loved them. Go figure!

The projector they use turns everyone’s skin colour a shade of green at times and they think everything is great! I cringe.

My favourite mode of delivery these days is to burn a blu ray file onto a plain DVD (sometimes dual layer)using Toaster. The encodes are beautiful.

My other favourite way of delivery is using ProRez Quicktime (set at a0-255 black level). My client had a basic Mac laptop and was able to play a 4 gig 1080p file from his desktop without any image stutter. It looked fabulous!

I hope the bandwith improves more so we can eventually stream everything in HD, but there will always be pockets where this is impossible.

We just played a video at a major international bank’s headquarters and they didn’t have a fast enough internet connection. Their firewalls and the throttling of their bandwith impaired this working for us.

All the Best,

Jim

[Jim Brodie]

Hi Chris,

I will check them out. I did stumble across a rather good one called Pond 5 that people should check out. Some very nice tracks.

Jim

[Jim Brodie]

Hi Joseph,

What is the maximum bit rate you go for laptop playback. I’ve restriced my to under 6 mbps and scaled the 1080p format in half to 960 x 540. Do you feel the mpg4 (H.264) route is the best codec these days for the job?

All the Best,

Jim

[Jim Brodie]

Thank you for your comment. I’ll look at the other option with Window’s Media player, however, I find that VLC is the most reliable and robust media player around!

All the Best,

Jim

[Jim Brodie]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for you quick response. The instructor would play them to a projector in conjunction with their power
point presentation.

All the Best,

Jim

[Jim Brodie]

Thank you Michael. I was just curious whether many people have ingested material into the Media 100 from this new camera.

All the Best,

Jim

[Jim Brodie]

Hi David, Thank you for sharing that information.

[Jim Brodie]

Hi David,

Thank you. That is sound advice. It raised another question for me,
what are folks charging for encoded files currently. Are you encoding different flavours of this on a per minute basis?

All the best.

Jim

[Jim Brodie]

Thank you for responses. Everything is shot in 1080p. Do you recommend downsizing it in the encodier(Adobe, Squeeze or MpegStreamclip) to 720p? I’ve even wondered whether it might be better to reduce the 1920×1080 file to 960×540 and then encode to get the optimal file size and eliminate any chance of playback stutter.

I’m quite impressed with how WMVs look these days. I’ve attached a good article on the best way to integrate video into powerpoint without having to compile and recompress.

https://support.microsoft.com/kb/291879

In my situation, these will be stand alone clips that will be shown on their own apart from any presentation program like keynote or powerpoint.

I’m just trying to determine what new standards are evolving currently as we make the full transition away from tape and DVD playback at public presentations. Offering a couple of flavours of encoding seems wise considering last minute changes in hardware at the event.