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Video Codecs

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Video Codecs

Hi all...

I am wondering something about video codecs. What codecs are the best file size-wise without sacrificing a lot of quality in the resolution? I have been outputting a file all day long in different codecs, and have not yet found one that left me with an image I liked. The best so far was Cinepak by Radius, but the file is absolutely MASSIVE in size. I tried Divx, but the picture is lacking a bit, and Divx is something that not everyone has on their computers. I want to make it easily viewed by ANYONE, either in Quicktime or MediaPlayer, without the viewer having to go and search for plugins or codecs.

Any help anyone could bring forth would be appreciated.

Cheers

Wade K's picture
"Don't want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard" - Paul Simon

"Don't want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard" - Paul Simon

I'm afraid Divx will be the best as far as size-quality goes. If the image is too pixelated you can up the bitrate in the 'settings' panel. It'll be a bit bigger but still nothing like what you get with Cinepak.
If you're going for something that everyone can view (on both PC and Mac) then Sorenson might be the way to go. It'll still be quite a bit bigger then Divx though.

There's also the 3ivx quicktime codec which is basically Divx as an Mpeg4 layer for Mac and can be viewed in Quicktime6; haven't tried that one out though, so I don't know if there are any catches to it.

cheers,
~D

I'd rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy [i]-Tom Waits
[/i]

i use sorenson

my online reels were compressed in premiere and the guy who did it for me used the newest sorenson compression. they came out great for their size. highly recommeded.

Thanks, gentlemen. I will be avoiding DIVX like the plague, only because of the compatability issue with other computers. I wish quicktime would be able to play DIVX, but alas, "it is not available on the quicktime server". I was not enamoured with the picture on DIVX, anyways... Lines got all jagged and blurry.

I knew about Sorenson. I don't know why I did not try that one (maybe I did not see it in the list of available codecs on my software - MediaStudio Pro 6.5?), but I will try it now. If anyone has any other suggestions as well, please fire them over.

Cheers

"Don't want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard" - Paul Simon

What I wonder is what do companies like Pixar use in rendering THEIR movie trailers? The resolution looks great, sound is great, and there is NO WAY it is 100 megs to download. Is there any way of finding out how they do that???

I have been messing around all day with these codecs again, and getting nowhere. Even the Sorenson is very large in size for some reason of another. I ended up with about 900 megs for a 4 minute (give or take) video file. That seems awfully big to me. I started doing it at 720x480 resolution, but I cannot get anything to render small enough with that, so I had to reduce it by half.

Damned computers frustrate me sometimes.

Cheers

Cheers

"Don't want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard" - Paul Simon

hey wade. My brother worked as a dvd author for a couple years...pixar trailers etc. use high end encoders to shrink the file and keep the quality. But to get one like apple has is gonna cost you 30-50 grand. not cheap, its the same kind of equipment to compress movies onto dvd. We used a $700 encoder to shrink down my film. There is still a bunch of problems with pixelating and stuff, but i really did mess with it much, we could probably take care of most of that by just making the file size a bit bigger...but we did take 5 gig to 9 meg...so it looks pretty good (o:

[b][size=3]Matt Shumway
Character Animator
Rhythm and Hues Studios
www.mattshumway.com

www.enigmathemovie.com
[/b][/size]

Wow! What was the name of that software?!?! Sounds great. Not the 30-50 grand one, as I cannot afford that, but the one you used, that is a bit more in my budget. I liked the quality of your film's compression (a lot), and to be honest, I was just about to e-mail you about that.

Cheers man

Wade

"Don't want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard" - Paul Simon

i will find out for you...

[b][size=3]Matt Shumway
Character Animator
Rhythm and Hues Studios
www.mattshumway.com

www.enigmathemovie.com
[/b][/size]

There are cheap programs that can give you decent compression as well. Discreet Cleaner is one of those. Very nice, easy to use program that compresses quite well. The trick is, that even though two compressed videos may both be DIVX, one compressed with a good compression program can be MUCh smaller and better quality than one done straight out of a program like Premiere.

Also you might want to look at Mpeg4, which is darn near DVD quality and the file sizes are quite reasonable if you use a good compression program.

Ender

[i]MPEG4 is the reason!!!!! :D
[/i]

I did like Mpeg 4. I thought the quality was pretty good. I still had a 150 meg file though. If I don't want to hear people moaning about how long it takes to download the file (not directly intended towards Phacker), I think I will try this program Matt has, if he could let me know the name of it. I kinda like the idea of bringing it down to less than 10 megs. I like the idea of ANYONE being able to download it quickly, including you, Phacker.

"Don't want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard" - Paul Simon

Info update on MPEG-4

Hi Wade, I found this thread while looking for others and I thought I might add some info I didn't have back then.

When you're making video files for internet download, there's a much better way to define the file size. I used to tweek the video options straight on the quality slider, but there's a nifty solution when you're working with codecs like MPEG-4.

Below the quality slider there's usually an option called "limit data rate to". With this option you can setup what is the maximum size for one second of your video going to be.

So, for example, if you're aiming at people with 56kbps connection speed, you can render the video with that same amount of kbps and it will compress the video following this direction. Of course it is a mere approximation (no 56kbps connection is ACTUALLY that fast), but it sure helps a lot.

Also it lets you know how big the final file is going to be. For example, you're doing a test that is 10 seconds long, and you think it shouldn't be larger than 1 megabyte... voilá, render it at 100 kbps and you'll end up with a 1 megabyte file. That simple.

Hope it helped.

Agradece, Poeria. Much appreciated.

Cheers

"Don't want to end up a cartoon in a cartoon graveyard" - Paul Simon

MPEG-4 is great, DivX is too flaky. MPEG4 is more user friendly, i.e., you can drop the pointer anywhere in the timeline and just start playing (there's always a pause before video comes only with DivX or WMV.) I'm willing to bet that most people have the most success with DivX only because the default straight-out-of-the-box settings in the encoders are better.

Frame rate is the key! The human eye is more sensitive to frame rates than to resolution or compression artifacts. When I encode (Quicktime Pro or iMovie), I fix the frame rate at the source frame rate (e.g., 29.97 fps NTSC for DV video) and scale down, say, to 1/2 size (I like nice round numbers, I think it helps keep the images a bit sharper.) This works out to 360x240 for NTSC DV source, a nice balance between image quality and viewability. Then I set the encoder to vary the image quality to maintain a constant 128kbs bit stream. That works out to, like, less than 1MB per minute, at wonderful quality for web videos. You can even play games at that point with image size and streaming rate (e.g., 192 kbps).

Try out different quality settings but always keep the frame rate locked at the source frame rate. Pull up the video track info for those Pixar trailers and see if you can get a hint for what settings they used.

--
JP Rowland jeremyrowland -at- mac.com
http://homepage.mac.com/jeremyrowland