Best Way To Show HDV Content To Clients
 

We are starting to develop clients that are interested in HD content. Other than hauling a G5 and Cinema display around or purchasing the Sony HDV deck has anyone found effective methods of doing client presentations on site.

Thanks,

Richard
2K-Plus
Atlanta

Compress to Quicktime H.264 and show it on a 17" Powerbook Widescreen

Hi John,

That thought crossed my mind but at this moment I am compressing 44 seconds of HDV 1080i edited in FCP5 on a 2x 2.5GHhz G5 and the render time is 2 hours and 6 minutes. Also I read that a G5 is needed to play back H.264 but I'll test that out in another hour or so.

Thanks,

Richard

High definition H.264 will not play smoothly on any PowerBook, even a fully loaded top of the line 17". If you disagree, hit cmd-I and notice the framerate the next time you play an H.264 HD movie trailer off apple.com.

Smooth PowerBook (and iBook for that matter) high definition playback can be had with DVCProHD. Of course the files will be much bigger, but carrying a laptop plus external FW hard drive is much easier than lugging around a dual processor Power Mac G5.

DVCProHD's compromised resolution (1280x1080 and 960x720 compared to HDV's 1440x1080 and 1280x720) can be overcome by being creative in FCP and QT Pro by special (bastardized / 'out of spec') export settings.

Tried compression master 3.1?
 

They just updated their software to include H.263 compression. I haven't experimented with it yet, but maybe you could find the right balance of compression/frame rate that will play well on your powerbook.

www.popwire.com (I think they have a free try out)

Balancing compression and frame rate would most likely give you results closer to a web-delivered video, which may go against Richard Lubash's objective of showing off the advantages of HD.

High definition H.264 playback requires a dual-processor G5 for full framerate (not jerky, not stuttery but rather perfectly smooth) playback. The advantage of H.264 is small file sizes. The disadvantage of H.264 is that encoding and decoding it requires a lot of processing power.

For smooth high definition video playback on a PowerBook, you're much better off playing a ~19-30 Mb/s MPEG-2 transport stream using VLC or a DVCProHD file using QuickTime Player.