Best WEB 1080p Compression Settings?
by Adam Schoales
on
Sep 19, 2009 at 10:44:05 pm
So in the past I've downloaded LOTS of 1080p trailers from Apple and they look great... I was just curious as to what would be good settings for creating 1080p content for web download/stream.
Obviously the file size will be big with longer files, but some of my stuff is really short anyways so it's not a big deal at the moment.
What are the ideal settings? Is there a way to replicate the quality of those Apple Trailers? (and yes, the original content I'm working with is HD footage)
Re: Best WEB 1080p Compression Settings? by Craig Seeman on Sep 19, 2009 at 10:54:38 pm
Download Apple trailer. Open in Quicktime 7.6.x. Use Show Movie Inspector and look at overall bit rate.
Open Show Movie Properties and look at Video and Audio bit rate.
Encode to H.264 and use multipass or two pass depending on what application you're using for encoding, matching the above bit rates.
Best to start with 35mm film or HDCAM SR sources because source impacts quality. Obviously you have what you have but the point is with all settings matching, your source may not be of the same quality as theirs.
Keyframe rate and b-frame distance and reference frames may depend on the source. Make sure you're using both Natural and Forced key frames and set the key frame rate (for forced) for 5 to 10 seconds apart but some people set them for every second. If you have the ability, choose Main Profile and entropy to CABAC.
Remember that the trailers are running 24 fps (23.98) which is only 80% of a 30 fps movie.
For instance, take a 1920 x 1080 30fps movie encoded at 8 Mbps. You could achieve the same quality by encoding a 24 fps movie @ 6.4 Mbps.
The Apple 1080 HD trailers' average bit rates hover around 9.5 Mbps. If this were 30 fps, to achieve the same quality, you'd need to average 11.4 Mbps.
