[Scott Firestone]

1. Yea, the situation is even worse than you think. Google QuickTime Gamma Vitrolite. It will lead you down a rabbit hole. the situation with VLC is even more complicated: it depends on which VLC output module you select. Total Insanity.

2. Film studios use RV player from Tweak Software. The player can only play back image sequences, not movie files, but it does so perfectly in every way. It’s $300.

3. Check out Kert Gartner’s blog. He just went through an exhaustive process of trying to figure out how to get the most optimized H.264 video output, experimenting with various software, codecs, image tweaking, gamma tweaking, etc. I was hoping he would find a fix to the problem, but, nope: He concludes that there’s no way to achieve good quality for compressed H.264 video, when playing the file on a PC in the QuickTime player, due to the way that QuickTime washes out the video. He has a pretty good workflow for maintaining high quality video: His process, in a nutshell: He encodes a high quality master version using the QuickTime “JPEG-photo” codec, with quality set to 99%: it looks as good as lossless, but has a smaller file size. Then, when he creates a version to upload to YouTube or Vimeo, he compresses using the QuickTime H.264 encoder at maximum quality, then uploads it. With this workflow, it’s important that people watch the video in the browser, and not in the QuickTime player on a PC.

4. for the codec/container for burning DVDs: I try not to use any type of intermediate container. I render still image sequences out of my 3D program (TIF), then assembly my video in After Effects: Then I go into Premier, and dynamically link to the After Effects Project. That way, Premier grabs an uncompressed render directly from After Effects, without using an intermediate container. Then use Premier to encode directly into the MPEG format needed by the DVD. Import that MPEG file into Encore, and Encore will not have to do any re-encoding.

5. You’re in luck if you only intend to have people watch the video on the web and DVD: You can generally avoid the contrast adjustment that incorrectly converts video to rec.601: that’s what happens when you play an H.264 video in the stand-alone QuickTime player on a PC. If you are on a PC, drag-and-drop an H.264 mov file into Firefox: it plays correctly. Open that same file in the Stand Alone QuickTime player on a PC, and it looks washed out.