V.O.D. compression on a Mac
 

Hi
I produce my own independent docos and wish to list them on my website in a downloadable format.
Any suggestions on the best compression software to use on a mac?

Pay the license for QuickTime Pro, upgrdade your OS and QuickTime to the latest and use MPEG4. If you want to make the best of it, use FCP's Compressor utility to make the video files. But you can get good results just exporting as QuickTime from whichever NLE you are using. You might need to play a bit with the compression settings in order to get optimal results depending on the kind of motion and detail present in your content. By using MPEG4, you make sure that it will be playable on almost any platform including upcoming DVD players. WM9 is cool too, but we still don't know how the industry will adopt it, whereas MPEG4 is an ISO standard, so you can expect it to be as common in years ahead as MP3 is today for audio.

As pointed out by Ignacio, QuickTime Pro is a quick and inexpensive way to get started. If you want to kick it up a notch, Sorensone Squeeze is an excellent package. You can by the whole suite or just a subset for Flash or Quicktime. If you can afford it, buy the suite. It will last you for years to come and their compression algorithms are very good. You may be tempted to get Cleaner. That package is old, support stinks, seems to get sold every couple of years and hasn't been updated for about 2 years. Probably just being milked.

As for choosing format, MPEG4 is a good one for all the reasons Ignacio mentions As a standard, it will reach the most clients. It's also supported by Real Player so QuickTime isn't required.

> You may be tempted to get Cleaner. That package is old,
> support stinks, seems to get sold every couple of years and
> hasn't been updated for about 2 years. Probably just being
> milked.

Good ol' Cleaner was really awesome in it's beginnings. I actually used it before it was publically released and I was also a beta tester for several years, in OS8 and OS9 times. It has now gotten really buggy and is really quite unusable. Compressor, which part of Apple's Final Cut Pro since version 4, does most of what Cleaner could do and them some. My comments are related to the OSX version of Cleaner. Perhaps the Windows version works better, given that some of recent software companies who have marketed Cleaner are mostly Wintel oriented.