[Mike Konstan]

So I did some tests with your suggested settings and they look promising.

Early on, I also tried to crop the image in equal amounts on all sides, but this appeared to somehow affect the video’s fields / field order. The input was interlaced, lower-field first, and output was intended to be progressive. Flip4Mac was supposed to deinterlace this video, but something was screwy there. I got rid of the cropping the file worked fine.

At one point, I started having problems with audio stuttering on playback. I checked the original Quicktime reference, which now was experiencing the same problem. After rebooting the computer though, audio playback on both the master Quicktime and the Windows Media encoded file were fine and back to normal.

I want to try some more experiments with your settings. Thank you for taking the time to write, and to explain some of these concepts. I’ll keep you posted here on my final results. Thanks!

[Mike Konstan]

I would think that the distance between keyframes would have to be less, since there is so much action and quick cutting, but I will try what you suggest. I also found that particular to Flip4Mac, raising the Quality setting also ends up making both the data rate higher and the file size bigger. I’m not worried about size of the file though… it’s just keeping that data rate down that I have to stick with. And as for considering cropping, we’d really like to keep our playback in 16×9 aspect. Were you suggesting to crop the sides down to 4×3 or to make it letterboxed in 4×3?

This project was shot 4×3 in the past and I believe the final .WMV’s were delivered at 500 and 800 kbps at 320×240. My client even seems to think 300kbps was also delivered. They were the same candids style projects with graphics and the quality looks great. Unfortunately, the settings that were used on those projects are no longer available…

Thanks for the suggestions… I will try them and get back to you with the results…

-Mike

[Mike Konstan]

Using Apple’s Compressor and Flip4Mac. I am applying deinterlacing since it is originating from DV video for use on the web. My best settings were:

Video: 2-pass VBR at a bit rate of 236kbps, peak bit rate 472, 320×180, 29.97fps, Windows Media 9 Standard, Quality slider set to 0 for smoothest playback, Complexity control set at “Offline Slow”, Main profile, keyframe every 5 seconds, buffer delay set to 5 seconds, B-Frame distance at zero frames, input: interlace – lower field first, output: progressive.

Audio: 1-pass CBR at 64kbps, 44.1khz, stereo.

Client must have 300 kbps data rate or under.

MAK Digital Media, Inc.
Video Post-Production Services
Orlando, FL

[Mike Konstan]

Had a similar problem… bringing in computer screenshots captured as moving video (via Ambrosia’s Snapz Pro X). Snapz saved the files out in the Animation codec with odd frame rates (11 fps) in my case. Each time I brought them into Motion (in a 720×480 SD project), they looked great but the length of the Quicktime movie file was usually half of what it should have been. (Snapz was also automatically adding an unnecessary alpha channel to the files when it saved as Animation, which was causing some problems with playback).

I fiddled with a variety of the Quicktime compression types and the only one I found that would retain close to the quality level of the original file was by using PhotoJPEG. The downside is that it takes about a 40 mb Animation file and inflates it to about five times as big– in this case, up to 212mg! I also tried DV in hopes to keep the file sizes down but clarity of the image degrades considerably.

Here are the Quicktime movie export specs I used.

Compression type: PhotoJPEG
Frame rate: 29.97
Keyframes: All (Default)
Compressor Depth: Color
Compressor Quality: High
Dimensions: 720×480

If someone has a better way where I can retain the large size of the original frame grab, please share it….

Thanks!

-Mike

MAK Digital Media, Inc.
Video Post-Production Services
Orlando, FL