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Old October 12th, 2003, 04:36 PM   #1
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Best codec/compressor for web?

Hey everyone--I'm going to be posting the trailer for my new documentary feature on the 'net soon and I'm researching the best codecs and compression I can use for optimal image and sound quality. What have you guys had best luck with? The trailer will be downloadable, but I don't think we'll have streaming capability. Anyway, thanks for the advice!

Peter
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Old October 12th, 2003, 06:00 PM   #2
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Peter,
Video compression is as much an art as it is a science. There really is no single "best" technique.

For our Lady X Films project series (link in my signature, below) we're using a Quicktime wrapper with Sorenson 3 image compression. It is a very powerful codec that offers good results under a wide variety of source footage (as evidenced by our series).

For audio we've used the IMA 4:1 compressor to compress our episodes' audio to 22.5kHz. After experimenting with several alternatives IMA proved to produce the most consistent results with the mixture of voice and music found in our episodes.

If you use Quicktime you do not really need a special streaming arrangement with your site host. Quicktime offers an internal streaming feature that can be built into the file during compression.

We also use Cleaner 6 to create all of our compressions.

Hope this is helpful.
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Old October 12th, 2003, 06:38 PM   #3
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Hey Ken--That is very helpful. Is it possible for people to view files compressed with Sorenson 3 and IMA using older versions of Quicktime? One of our concerns is that we want this trailer to be easily viewable--and compatability with a variety of viewers is a definite plus. Thanks again for your suggestions,

Peter
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Old October 12th, 2003, 07:45 PM   #4
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Yes. Backward-compatibility can be specified through Cleaner. We've had, perhaps, two "unable to view" complaints after thousands of episode views. We strongly suspect that those complaints were cockpit errors and/or lame PC problems. (Note that users of old versions of the Quicktime Reader will often be nagged to update when the Reader is invoked.)
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Old October 20th, 2003, 06:10 PM   #5
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MP4, AAC audio

MP4 is the best these days. AAC audio is part of the MP4 codec.
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