Jonathan Capra
Forum Replies Created
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Yeah I guess I had a hard time describing my expectations. I guess in retrospect, I was looking for something that has intraframe compression that is slightly better than MPEG-2, but would be highly reactive when editing/jogging when layed into an NLE.
If it weren’t for the latter requirement, I would have used something like DivX. VP6 seems to fit the bill (at least when you set it to 1 keyframe for every frame).
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I did a couple experiments.. and VP3 was decent quality at half the size.. and VP6 was very good quality at 1/4 size of the original DV clip.
The key was, the codec options actually allow you to set as low as one key-frame per frame, thereby essentially opting out of any interframe compression. This seemed to make it highly editable/joggable in my NLE. Response time to a jog was pretty instantaneous. I assume that this is a big factor in what makes a codec ‘delivery-only’ since the viewer will more-or-less watch a clip sequentially.
I’m gonna do a couple more tests and report back. That SheerVideo looks good, but probably in cases where quality loss of any level is unacceptable. This is stuff where I dont want to delete, but still want to keep around just-in-case.. I wonder if Sheer might be ideal for VJ’ing where jog-latency is crucial.
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What do you all know about the on2 VP3 or VP6 codecs? Could this be a good compromise codec?
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Well I’ll give it a try..
These clips are stored on a big-but-slow hard drive for potential retrieval in a near-line fashion. So drive space is the top concern here, rather than video quality.
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I had always understood the DV codec to be a fixed data-rate of about 3.5 megabytes/second. But I’ve seen software where the DV output requester has a 1-100% quality slider. Does this imply that you can actually variably compress the DV codec?
Also I’m wondering if I can revisit the software Motion-JPEG codec again for this level of archiving. I remember it being a bit hurky-jerky, but last time I used it CPU speeds were way slower. And if I remember correctly MJPEG could be encoded into AVI files and it was not an interframe codec. What do y’all think?
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Well I am gonna try to put up one more fight. But I don’t think they will care.
How about DarwinOS running on this server.. Maybe in VM Is that possible?
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https://www.apple.com/finalcutserver/
This site says the client software runs on Windows, but the server software has to run on a Mac server.
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Yeah ultimately our needs won’t just be DV only.. so iMacs are not a long-term solution. It was more a matter of there being X amount of money to be used now and Y to be used next year. So, that being the case, I had made a just made the proposal along the lines of software-now.. get 6 more months out of the G4’s.. then hardware after that.
But this minimum system requirement factor screws that plan up. So it just means more time revising the proposal and getting some eye-rolling from the boss.
One of the upgrade objectives was to insure all machines were running the same version, so at this point I am going to recommend two MacPro’s now, keeping two 1.25 G4’s for tagging/billboards/PSA’s and then retiring the rest.
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I just thought of this.. If I had already specified a build folder and done an initial build, then gone back and re-encoded all the MPEG2 files, then opened the project up again.. Could it be counting the VOBs that are still sitting in that build folder AND the new MPEGs that it just re-linked when I opened the project again?
I’m thinking if I delete the VOBs sitting in that build folder, it might solve it? I’d try it now except I’m home today, where I have all Windows machines. Have to wait till I go to work tomorrow to try it.
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ooh good idea