Artist Needs Help With Online Video Art Show Efficency
by Gordy Grundy
on
Jul 23, 2008 at 5:24:33 pm
Brothers,
I have a gallery art show coming up soon. I made a page of videos, all Quicktime. I believe I made them as small as I can.
But it still is slow.
- Can I make them smaller files? (Not sure how.)
- Should I also offer in Windows Media Player or is Quicktime as universal as I was led to believe.
- Any ideas for making this easy for all to see?
Re: Artist Needs Help With Online Video Art Show Efficency by Daniel Low on Jul 24, 2008 at 3:56:37 pm
Wrong!
Windows Media is far more common but actually far, far less 'popular' than Quicktime, as, simply put, the Windows Media Player is a rubbish video player.
Have you ever tried scrubbing through a Windows Media movie, or advancing frame by frame using the cursor keys for example, or moving through a loaded clip instantly without waiting for WMP to finish buffering, even though it's all been buffered.
On top of that, Quicktime supports many many more formats and codecs than WMP.
The clips are excellent quality and loaded fairly quickly, maybe slightly off on the aspect ratio but without knowing what settings you used (e.g. datarate) it's difficult to know what you could tweak.
I'll do a closer analysis of them tonight.
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Re: Artist Needs Help With Online Video Art Show Efficency by Gordy Grundy on Jul 24, 2008 at 4:46:47 pm
Thanks Danny. I appreciate the look. This project is a wild one and its gotta be easy to watch. I look forward to your analysis. (For example, at my place, some of the videos dont even download or do so very slowly.)
I like your argument about QT. (I'd rather leave it at that than add Windows.)
Re: Artist Needs Help With Online Video Art Show Efficency by Daniel Low on Jul 24, 2008 at 9:04:54 pm
Ok,
I've had a look at a few of your clips, some observations:
The frame size for the clips is 480x360 (which is 4:3 aspect ratio) yet the active picture area is approx 480x316 (Which is neither 4:3 nor 16:9), and you obviously have letterboxing on the clip (black bars top and bottom).
The average data rate is around 2.3Mb/s
Suggestions:
The aspect ratio is wrong on the video, did you choose to add letterboxing or was it something in the workflow that added them?
You need to choose a total frame size which is either 4:3 or 16:9, you want to avoid letterboxing as these areas of black use up valuable bits of data. Do you shoot 4:3 or 16:9?
For 16:9 I'd suggest a frame size of 512x288, ideally or 480x270.
For 4:3 stick with 480x360.
You could probably get away with cutting your datarate down by at least 50%. If it still looks good to you at that datarate, then go down even further until it starts to look bad and work up slightly from there.
See how you go with that.
Re: Windows Media: It's an inferior video format to H.264 so you'll not get better quality. However if the majority of your viewers are very basic Windows PC users then you should probably offer it but it's pointless replacing the Quicktime with it.
Obviously every Mac user has Quicktime installed but any Windows user who has done even basic video viewing on-line should have Quicktime installed. Anybody who uses an iPod/iPhone or iTunes also has it. Obviously you can't view Windows Media on any type of iPod or iPhone.
In my 20 or so years of consulting in this area I've found that only ignorant users or arrogant Apple-haters prefer Windows Media over Quicktime.
You get so much of a better, fuller and more interactive experience with Quicktime. To prove my point compare the stuff here with the stuff here or here
Like I said earlier, try scrubbing through a Windows movie or pausing it and then looking at it frame by frame.
Let us know how you get on.
__________________________________________________________________
Please post back saying what solved your problem. It could help others, and saying 'thanks' is free!
Re: Artist Needs Help With Online Video Art Show Efficency by Daniel Low on Jul 25, 2008 at 6:55:39 am
Do you need to?
Well you said that some of the video were slow to download - reducing the datarate will speed up that process.
You should be using Compressor rather than FCP to do the compression. That will allow you to adjust the datarate exactly rather than just using a quality slider, as well as giving far better results overall. But yes moving the quality slider to the left will reduce the datarate.
__________________________________________________________________
Please post back saying what solved your problem. It could help others, and saying 'thanks' is free!
