Making MP4's in Compressor
 

Hi MacHeads!

When I go to make an mp4 in compressor, it limits the bitrate at 2Mb/s! What gives? (It's like this little slider thingamabob that wont let me get past 2000kbps) When I make h.264 MOV's in Compressor, it lets me enter in any amount for the bitrate. 2Mb/s isn't enough for HD video, so why does Compressor do this for mp4's. Am I missing something?

-Steve

El Bumpo!

-Steve

Apple hates MPEG.
HA.
Seriously though, export your MPEG-4/h.264 files through FCP. It will do the bitrates you want.

Unless there's a specific reason you're using MP4 I'd try Flash instead. Higher quality output for very little data size.

Yes export to > Quicktime movie right in FCP will allow you to set a high bit rate and have a complete list of codecs in a pull down menu.

Aside from the speed which mp4 files render, there are no advantages over h.264 either in size or quality.

The reason I like MP4s is because I can play them on my Playstation 3 and the PS3 wont play MOVs. Also, I like compressor because then I can utilize all my cores on my Mac Pro and compressor lets me do simple gamma corrections. (also, the image tends to be better when i use Compressor vs right out of FCP, maybe that's just a flawed perception on my part)

-Steve

Steve, export your movies as ProRes then push those intermediates through MPEG Streamclip to make them into MP4's ... MPEG Streamclip's MP4's are so much better than FCP/Compressor that its just not funny.

Should I just export "movie" and just let it export as a an uncompressed HDV reference file? If not, then how do i export as ProRes, QT conversion?

Thanks for your help Andy!

I have made mp4 files with MPEGStreamclip that will not play on client's Windows PCs. No idea why but Compressor's mp4 files work.

I tried to make a better mp4 with Compressor by setting the frame rate to 29.97 / 640x480, keyframe every frame and constant bit rate at 2048. Two and a half minutes made a 75mb file but visually it didn't come out that great. h264 would have done better but the PS3 doesn't recognize those I guess. Does the PS3 recognize Divx? That might be a way to go.

Make a reference movie file for import into MPEGStreamclip. Self-contained shouldn't be needed.

But I still have the problem of having to do gamma correction, and I don't think MPEG Streamclip has gamma filters...does it?

Steve, I haven't actually tried this myself, but I've recently heard that if you export a reference file in the animation codec, the gamma might remain "true" when you later make it into an H.264 with Compressor and not need any gamma correction. I don't know if this approach would apply to MPEG Streamclip and the mp4 files but, if you are really worried about not being able to do gamma correction, perhaps animation codec might be worth a try.

Keep a log of what mp4 settings work for a specific length of video to playback on the finicky PS3. I've spent a ridiculous amount of time trying to convert a video for the PS3. There is NO help online anywhere, so I'd appreciate if you would share your findings. It's not as difficult as the PSP though, that thing is an absolute nightmare to encode for.

MP4's for the PS3 are very easy. Just go with Quicktime conversion, then choose just plain mp4, then choose MP4 (not MP4 ISMA, i think) and then go with h.264 encoding. The rest of the parameters are up to you.

-Steve

This might solve your problem, Steve
 

Hi Steve.

I just found this great tip (from Stu Maschwitz) about how to take an H.264 .mov file and turn it into a .m4v file which PS3 will then recognize and play - all without re-encoding!

ProLost: Convert H.264 Quicktime to PS3

This means that you can encode in H.264 using Compressor (at a much higher bitrate than 2 Mb/sec!!) and also make your gamma correction in Compressor (to counteract the usual H.264 gamma washout) and then simply use QuickTime Pro with the "Pass Through" formats to turn it into an .m4v that should play in PS3.

I'll probably test this myself in the next couple of days.