They were commercials that Marc Higa shot...

http://modernartpictures.com/commercialLaguna.html

Plays fine on my machine at work...

Tim -there are about at least 3 good bitrate calculators (free) on the PC - perhaps you can recommend one for all your fellow Mac users?

This is the one I use on the PC

http://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=...ate_calculator

Great for DVD compression, but you can enter custom target sizes.

It seems like I've tried everything. I'll go into Premiere, select Video Settings, reduce the quality to 50%, set fps to 15 and codec to H.264 and I'm coming up with 100MB+ files for 3 minute .mov. Something has to be amis!

Is there a selection for "Quarter Size"?

If it's any consolataion, Joyce, I'm having the same issues. I downloaded QT 7, installed it, pulled up the Premiere file and went to export it to miovie using the same settings and I'm getting the same results. Mine's about 4 minutes and I'm getting 114MB results.

My window size is 640 X 360 which gives me a 16 X 9 result.

That's where I am too 640 X 360. BTW, where are you. I saw you today at the Jim Cameron deal but you disappeared.

SUT and guys, thanks for your help on the compression deal. Any other suggestions would be really great because 3 min videos shouldn't be 80+ MB or am i wrong???

Hi Joyce & Jonathan,

As per the dvinfo policy and code of conduct, I deleted your off-topic posts. (classified at meta-discussion.)
It isn't a good idea to let the millions of people on the internet know where you are staying while in Vegas. In the future please use private email for private discussions.

thanks,
Tim

P.S.: I've moved this to "DVD and Web Video Delivery" so you can get more advice.

Have you set Quicktime to "Pro?" When you go into the quicktime options you can punch in exactly how many kbps you would like to target. This allows you to control your encode.

If you would like your 3 minute video to come in at around 20MB, then use a bitrate of 1000kb/s. This is irregardless of codec used.

Thank you Tim. I hadn't thought of that and you're right. Anyway, where in QT would I set the bit rate. And as long as I have you, you have nio idea how much I appreciate all the help people like you, Paolo, Stephen, Jonathan and the other really smart people here give me and others.

Tim-
From me as well. As I meet different people here, they become like family and I talk to them like they are but you're right, there are millions who aren't. Good call and thanks. Will we see you at the party here on Monday?

Joyce something is not right. Here is a 15-minute video sized at 640x360, 24fps and it's about 80MB: http://www.cruisercast.com

When you say 50% quality, do you mean half resolution? Quality and size are different settings. When you prepare for an export you should see a QT dialog box similar to this: http://www.paolociccone.com/images/QT_H264.jpg

I use 24 fps with 1 keyframe every 96 frames. Quality, see the slider below the frame information, at just above Medium. If you press Cmd, on a PC I believe it's Alt, and you have the mouse over the Quality Slider, you should see also the setting for "Temporal" quality. I set that to medium as well. You mght want to try playing with that.
I set "Encoding" to "Best Quality" but if you are in a hurry try "Faster encode".
With these settings you should get something around 15-18MB for 3 minutes of video.

I don't see anything like that. I'm in Premiere Pro 2.0 with the timeline up. I click on File, Export, Movie and Settings. I select Quicktime from the dropdown File Type menu then click on Video in the menu to get video-specific settings at which point I select Sorensen 3 from Compressors, enter 640 X 360 for frame size and reduce the Quality to 50%. I then limit the Data Rate tio 1000 kB/sec and hit OK which takes me back to the Export Movie dialogue box where I Name it and Save it. Again, I'm new to all of this end of the business and the guys around here who usually help me understand things are TV veterans and not Internet gurus so you're my only hope so I really appreciate your help.

You're very welcome :)

Sorenson is not H.264. That's a completely different codec. A good one, but different. I have no experience with Premiere but AfterEffects and other apps allow you to set the options for each codec. Maybe somebody familiar with Premiere can help with this issue. Do you see H.264 at all in the list of QT codecs available?

Yes but when I select H.264, it doesn't allow me to controll bit rate, only quality, frame rate and frame size. I can reduce the Quality to 50% but it still results in humongus file sizes like over 100Mb

I'm not aware of ANY application that will encode H.264 properly except QTPro7 (on the PC side). That is the problem with the codec is that it is completely proprietary to QTPro.

For the Sorenson scenario you listed try limiting the bitrate to 200 instead of 1000. It will exponentially reduce your filesize. Also alot of web video's are 424X240 (for 16x9 scenarios). Had you considered using 424x240 to save file size as well?

good luck..

Well, I reduced to 424 X 240, limited to 200 bit rate and sorensen 3 at 50% quality and 15 fps which resulted in a final file size of 88Mb. I just don't get it but thanks guys for trying.

Don't mean to contradict you here but proprietary defines a technology that is defined by a company and is exclusively controlled by that company. The Sorenson codec is an example. MS-Word is another. MPEG and H.264 are not proprietary as they are defined by standardization groups that then publish the specs.
Apple has provided a easily accessible, widespread implementation, that's all.
Both HD-DVD and Blue Ray require support for H.264.

Sorenson Squeeze, available for both Mac and Windows, includes an H.264 encoder. Lead Multimedia has a H.264 DirectVideo filter. There are other companies that offer all kind of H.264 products.

Cheers.

Very true Paolo.


I can attest to the fact that H.264 is a bear to get out of a PC. I've tried for months to get a good routine for it on Liquid, Media Composer Adrenalin, Premiere Pro and Boris Red. No luck with any of them. The only way I've found to do it is with QTPro7 and it takes a looooong time to encode.

It wouldn't have bothered me so much but T.Dashwood frequently asked me to post video's using the H.264 format and I tried like hell to accomodate but it is a pain on a PC. Mac folk can't seem to open an HD-WMV that was encoded using the WME Pro. Instead DivX seems to work for everybody using the HD profile and the economy in file size per quality is excellent.

If it makes you feel any better, I opened up Premiere with just a DV clip on the timeline and tried to encode H.264 and the file size it huge.

Try this instead.

Go to:

File > Export > Adobe Media Encoder (opens the encoder window)

Now Select Widows media but don't bother to drop down and select any of their preset's. Instead, to the right of the "Preset" drop down there is an open preset button. Click it and it will ask you to browse for the preset. Instead of the vpr it suggest drop the file type box down and select prx instead. Now, you'll need a prx to use so Click here to download a medium quality prx to use. Try encoding and see if it works. I have all kinds of custom preset. The one I've provided will work for PC or MAC users.

Let me know how it works out...

Vegas 6.0d comes with the MainConcept H.264 encoder, a great performer. If not, Nero has an encoder that is not bad. And there are free ones if you search around.

This is interesting. Makes you wonder what's the big deal in creating an encoder that works acceptably on Windows. If I were the conspiracy theory kinda guy I would smell smoke from Redmond, but of course I'm not that kind of person ;) I bet this is going to be solved soon.
Tell you the truth I was quite surprised about the speed of Compressor. It used to take a lot longer, they probably improved it in the last revision. It could be that the video that I submitted was mostly virtual sets from Chromakey, maybe the consistent background makes the encoder go a lot faster.

Take care.

I have not explored that app. Thanks for pointing it out. Let's just say it's not in my bag of tricks.

another way to look at it is that h.264 won't play back on any of the commonly available software players, except for quicktime.

beyond that, apple did not fully implement h.264 with their player, so you can't get the best h.264 quality when you encode or play back with quicktime... if you want to see real h.264, get the nero encoder, and use the nero player with it.

nero also includes a quicktime-compatible setting, so it will create really nice two-pass mpeg4 files... i would do that before i'd pay for qt pro, because for one thing, nero is a whole lot faster to encode.

the holy grail of web video files is to create something that can be played back natively, without having to download the player software first... the only codec that does that is wmv, because winxp makes up the vast majority of computers on the 'net.

flash used to be part of the native winxp install, but microsoft stopped doing that with the flash 8 codec and player... but the flash 8 player download is pretty small, so it's the only realistic alternative to wmv these days.

i would not put divx or any qt format on the web, go flash 8 if you don't like wmv.

Dan,

Native playing is what it's all about for web TV (wmv). For web movies I choose WMV or DivX. Lately I've been making iPod & PSP content. That is a very little MP4.

Thanks for the Nero gold...

... and iTunes. Given the popularity of iTunes, it is a very "commonly available player".

I'm sorry but this is a overly generalizing statement, and one that encourages proprietary solutions. Nobody argues that the majority of PCs are Windows-based but the number, non the percentage, of non-Windows users is around several millions. Now, while that probably represent 10% of the installed based, it's still a few millions. Using wmv is gonna piss off a lot of people. Using something like Flash, which is even available for Linux, is a much fairer solution.
[/QUOTE]

I released my first Vodcast, made with the HD100, this weekend, produced a H.264 file, made it clear that it requires iTunes, which is probably already installed on the majority of machines but just in case, here is a link.
The video has been downloaded solidly for the past 3 days and I didn't hear a word about any problems.
I watched the server's log files continuosly and the majority of downloads where indeed from Windows machines and a lot of them downloaded the video using iTunes for Windows. Not one email about "I can't play the video".
And the target audience, motorcycle riders, is not famous for being computer savvy ;)

IMHO, iTunes is the great equalizer of video distribution on the Net. Love it or hate it, it's free, it's available, it's probably already there, it's gonna be around for a while. Take advantage of it.

Just my 2,000 Lire ;)

nero rocks, no doubt about it! i have an ipod demo clip up on my website that was created with nero, so you can download it and check the compatibility for yourself... i posted a link to it somewhere here on dvinfo.net, but i can't remember where?

paolo, there are over 1 billion people using the internet today, so millions is pretty insignificant... specifically, here are the exact statistics: less than 3% of the computers on the 'net are macs, so both qt and itunes are basically not native installs with any operating system.

i personally refuse to install itunes, in part because the qt player has become unmanageable bloatware... in particular, it always re-installs itself as a startup no matter how you tweak the settings, and lately i've been unable to get it to open up clips in the same window, it always defaults to a new window every time that you click on a video clip... so you end up with multiple windows all over your desktop.

i am not alone in this, there is a big anti-qt backlash going on right now, and that will encompass itunes as well, because it's also a proprietary apple product... there are very few pc software alternatives to itunes, for downloading and viewing ipod files.

we need to concern ourselves with professional solutions that allow for the widest possible distribution of our content, so it behooves us to watch how big business is handling the video ipod format... putting your content on the 'net only in the video ipod format is way too limiting, as you can see here:

“But NBC and station owners were quick to to draw distinctions between NBBC and other broadcasters’ efforts to put their shows on the Internet and sell episodes on iTunes....We are prioritizing NBBC compared to the revenue sharing on portable devices,” says Terry Mackin, executive VP, Hearst-Argyle Television and past Chairman of the NBC affiliates board. “As the market exists right now, the revenue would be a small opportunity compared to this business. Very small.”

http://www.broadcastingcable.com/art...&referral=SUPP

Which is built on non PC machines and it has proliferated and expanded thanks to the platform-independent standards designed in the past 30 years.
Amazon, Google etc don't run on Windows. 60%+ of web servers run Apache and the vast majority of emails are handled by Sendmail etc. etc.
Platform independence and adherence to standards is important. Especially because Microsoft has a track record of poor quality in their software.
Once you give up your freedom of choice, it's gone and it doesn't come back.

Well, from the point of view of a business man, myself, millions are really relevant. If I have a solution that satisfies the majority of potential users, I'll take that instead of one that excludes millions of them. Also, were did you see the numbers that you quoted? Do you have a reference to the sources?

Speculations and personal bias. BTW, I would not have a problem with proprietary players, mind you, that is a completely different story than propriatary formats, as long as the player is available on all platforms and it's supported and developed at the same level on all platforms.
That makes plain sense because you, the author of the video, know that the same experience will be delivered regardless the personal choice of the viewer. Again, Macromedia/Adobe Flash and iTunes are good examples.
Simple MPEG files are also good. Probably DivX, I'm not yet familiar with it, as long as a format is an open standard and there is a player for it on all majors OSs.

I never mentioned nor suggested to use "only the video ipod format" whatever that means. iPods don't have a proprietary format. They support MPEG4 and H.264, another MPEG spec. Don't see the limitation there.
No, when I suggested H.264 and the fact that everybody and his brother has iTunes installed, I meant just that. My Vodcast is formatted at 640x360 24fps, a format incompatible for the iPod. But the fact that I publish it in H264 means that I can give you a one-click link to get it inside iTunes and to subscribe you to next ones. One click. Doesn't get any easier than that.
Now, you want to make your life harder and not install iTunes, that's OK, you still retain your freedom of choice, see, I like that.

You want to play the video with your favorite player? Go ahead, it's still a glorified MPEG file. If that was a WM file that freedom of choice would be taken away from millions of viewers.

OMG Dan, You hit the nail on the head. QT is becoming the new RealMedia. You would think they'd have learned from Real. Real would have absolutely owned online media but they sold out to the advertisers and now so is QTPlayer.

I only have QTPro for one reason and that's to encode H.264 but now that I know about Nero, QTPro's days are numbered on my system.

I personally have a problem with iTunes in that interferes with some of my other software (Avid).

So that rules it out for me.

This is why we should be looking for platform independent solutions. I am still delivering in MPEG1 because it plays on everything (even those with OS9).

how many people sit at a web server to watch video over the internet? none.

the ipod video format excludes millions of web surfers, because most of 'em do not have the required software necessary to 1)download the video file(itunes), and 2)play it back(quicktime).

why would you put up a video file that requires proprietary software just download it? and then it can only be played back by a player that none of the major video sites use?

since it went online, over 15 million video ipod files have been downloaded from apple's site... that's a good number, but it pales in comparison to the biggest video sites on the 'net:
video streams per month-
MSN Video 9,279,000
YouTube 9,045,000
Google Video 6,246,000
iFILM 4,336,000
no quicktime, no h.264, no mpeg, and no video ipod format on those sites.

do you put your vodcasts online in any video formats other than h.264? can your footage be accessed and downloaded by anything other than itunes?

you asked to see operating system stats:
"Windows XP is the most popular operating system. The windows family counts for nearly 90%" http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

"The Mac only had 2.35 percent of the world’s personal computer market in 2005, according to IDC, up slightly from its 2.02 percent share in 2004." http://www.redherring.com/Article.as...its+Jump+41%25

the point here is that the internet is a windows-only world, and if you want your footage to get the widest possible distribution, you'd better be putting it out there in a native windows format like wmv... the only exception to that is flash 8.

i used to encode a lot of mpeg1 for the 'net many years ago, and while it is still very compatible, everyone has a wmv player these days... look at the winxp o.s. penetration of 73%, wmv is the native video format for winxp, because it's a mandatory part of every winxp install.

That wasn't the point, the point is that open standards are what made the Internet possible. If, for example, TCP/IP was made to run only on IBM mainframes, the vast majority of computers at that time, then we would not have the wonderful world of Internet that we have today. HTTP and HTML were invented on a NExt workstation and designed to be open and platform independent. Taking all that and saying that other platforms are not important is a bit like biting the hand that fed you.

Dan, there is no iPod format. It's either MPEG4 or H264, I said that before. Those are general formats, can be played with all kind of players.

We're going in circles here. See above.

BTW, iFILM gives you multiple choices. Google uses MPEG4. Both Google and YouTube don't give you the level of control on the quality that I need.

No.

Of course. It happens every day. The site provides both a direct link to the video file and a one-click link to subscribe. Nobody, I repeat, nobody made a single criticism about the format.

Nobody argues about the fact that Windows is the OS of the majority. Your source though is not representative of the common user. That is a specilized web site collecting statistics about people hitting on their website. I never visited that site and the company/organization is not a credited survey specialist. Those numbers have little or no value for the purpose of drawing a map of OS users in the world.

No it's not, the Internet is largely run by Unix and Mainframes machines.
When Microsoft tried to switch Hotmail from BSD Unix to Windows the whole system came to a screaching halt and they had to go back. BTW, the Mac
business unit in Redmond is about 300 people, if I remember well and MS has recently started a Linux Lab. Even MS recognizes that there is diversity out there and that it deserves attention.
There is a lot of clients that run Windows, I don't contest that.

Just to be totally clear about the intention of this post, I don't pretend to tell you what to use for encoding. You're happy with WM, more power to ya.
This thread was started by somebody who needed advice on what format to use. Several people gave their contribution and we tried to stay away from "religious wars" because we all know how it ends.
I'm not against WM, my rebuttal was against some rather totalitarian and outrageous statements made.
The validity of a software or a format goes way beyond the market penetration validation. Just because everybody is doing it it doesn't mean that other solutions are not valid. In fact many time we found better solutions than the status quo.
Keeping our options open and supporting platform-independent standards is not only easy but necessary for the survival of the computing platform that we enjoy today. Think of it as "digital enviromental protection". Or we might end, like in "Demolition Man", having only Taco Bell as a choice for dinner out.

I said all I had to say, I believe that people heard enough about this and I will not post more messages in this thread.

Taike care.

I should probably let this thread die, but I have a situation that I think pertains and I wonder if anyone has seen anything similar?

Has anyone noticed significant real-world performance differences amongst the various codecs? Perhaps a loaded question.

To make a long story longer, I started out with Quicktime and Windows Media 9 endcoding which I put up on my web host. From my home (DSL/cable) I can see many, if not all, of my various encoding attempts, from both a web host (progressive downloads) and streaming host.

However, my wife at her work, (T1) indicated that she could never see any of these clips, perhaps a corporate firewall issue. Nonetheless, I switched to Flash and viola! she can see all of it. (at my local public library, I can't even see my website!)

Many details could account for the differences here, e.g. bit rates, file sizes, streaming vs. progressive, so on and so forth, but for me, bottom line, with media of comparable encoding inputs, the Flash video, for some reason, succeeded where the others could not. Any rational explaination here?

For what's it worth, I don't care what I codec I use as long as it's broadcast quality, large aspect ratio, small file sizes, quick renders, and immediate playback, all over a heavily congested internet :^) (tongue-in-cheek)

Thanks in advance, Paul Carlberg

what's your web address Paul?

Stephen, it's highplainsdv.com, I'm in the midst of swapping web hosts, but my clips (all short) spawn from a streamer.

It opened right up for me. I'm on comcast cable.

again, that is not the slightest bit relevant to this thread.

as i have already pointed out, the ipod video format specifically requires itunes to access the files, and it uses a crippled subset of h.264, it is not even full-on h.264, all of which makes it specific to the ipod... claiming that ipod video "can be played back with all kinds of players" is false information.

you proved that yourself, because you haven't posted any itunes software alternatives, or even any software players that are capable of playing back the ipod video format.

as content creators, we should never let platform fanaticism interfere with content distribution.

if i thought that the ipod video format had any kind of market penetration, i'd be glad to use it myself... but the stats indicate otherwise, take a look at how messed up something as simple as audio podcasting is:

"For all its buzz, podcasting is a cowboy industry -- and much of its future lies in the hands of a handful of companies vying to play sheriff and bring order. PodTrac, Podbridge and PodShow are all trying to help advertisers get a better grasp on how many people are listening and what the audience looks like.

Consider the contradictions surrounding the subject..."

http://www.adageglobal.com/article.p...icle_id=108741

You have a point there. Many corporate firewalls (ISA servers) are very picky with streaming or won't even allow it at all.

As for QT, I installed it without Itunes, but it is NOT the best player out there for H.264 under Windows, certainly not for High Def videos. VLC and Nero player are much better (VLC is Mac compatible I think).

Every format is a compromise. I agree with those recommending the less compromising formats. Having two or three formats available could be a solution.

VLC is the best app I have found so far for HD playback on my Windows laptop

-gb-.