What is the best web video format? Having trouble with QT and Compressor conversion
by Michael Kellam
on
Apr 28, 2006 at 7:56:58 pm
Hi,
I am trying to take a clip of some of my work and put it on the web. I have done a lot of this in the past, but only on a PC. I have been trying to find a good file type, size, codec and compression rate in QT and Compressor but I'm not too excited about the results. I have tried exporting Quick Time with h.264 trying various options for image size and quality and even when the video looks bad, the file size is still pretty large. I tried using mp4 from compressor and it was worse. What do you suggest?
When I was editing on Premiere Pro on a PC, I got the best looking web video exporting avi files from Premiere Pro and then converting them in Microsoft's free media encoder into wmv files. I could get a 2 minute clip at 250 MBPS that generated a file about 3 MB that looked really good.
When I try creating a QT file with h.264, the 500 MBPS video doesn't look nearly as good, but is 11 MB in size. Am I doing something wrong or should I be using a different web video format?
Re: What is the best web video format? Having trouble with QT and Compressor conversion by walter biscardi on Apr 28, 2006 at 8:22:54 pm
[Michael Kellam]"When I try creating a QT file with h.264, the 500 MBPS video doesn't look nearly as good, but is 11 MB in size. Am I doing something wrong or should I be using a different web video format?"
what's the length of your video? What's the original format?
I compress HD for the web and it looks incredible. I compress DV for the web and it looks pretty good depending on which of the H.264 compressions I use. I generally use the 800 or 1mb LAN settings.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
http://www.biscardicreative.com
Director, "The Rough Cut"
http://www.theroughcutmovie.com
Now Posting "Good Eats" in HD for the Food Network
"I reject your reality and substitute my own!" - Adam Savage, Mythbusters
Re: What is the best web video format? by Michael Kellam on Apr 28, 2006 at 8:39:09 pm
Hi Walter,
I wish I was compressing HD for the web ;-) or doing anything else with HD for that matter!
It's 1:44 in length. I originated it in DV. The best clip I've gotten so far is using H.264 280x217, 8 bit mono 32khz audio at 762 Kbps and the clip is 9.5 MB. I'm still experimenting, but I've done quite a bit already. I'd like it to be a little bigger than 280x217, but I don't really want to go too big on the download size.
The only reason I'm asking as I say is because I used to make wmv files that were 320x240 and about 3 MB for the same duration...
Re: What is the best web video format? by walter biscardi on Apr 28, 2006 at 8:51:02 pm
[Michael Kellam]"Is H,264 your preferred codec for DV to web?"
Yep. I use the Web Download (Quicktime 7) 800Kbps or LAN settings for everything I do. I don't really pay much attention to file size as I'm just working with broadband connections and QT 7 starts playing these files very quickly.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
http://www.biscardicreative.com
Director, "The Rough Cut"
http://www.theroughcutmovie.com
Now Posting "Good Eats" in HD for the Food Network
"I reject your reality and substitute my own!" - Adam Savage, Mythbusters
Never Mind... I was expecting the impossible! ;-) QT Rocks! by Michael Kellam on Apr 28, 2006 at 9:01:56 pm
Walter,
After looking at them side by side, I have come to the conclusion that I want more than the technology allows ;-) Something like great looking full screen HD quality in a handy 1 MB file.
The H.264 looks good, so I think I'll shoot for that even with the larger file sizes. Thanks for replying!
Re: Never Mind... I was expecting the impossible! ;-) QT Rocks! by John Fishback on Apr 28, 2006 at 9:25:19 pm
I played around with H.264 while you guys were discussing this. I used a talking head I had in my box that was 8-bit uncompressed from Beta. I used a frame size of 280x210. In video settings I set 500kbps as the data rate and in audio settings 96kbps. The resulting data rate was 512kbps (go figure). Final file size for a 1:50 clip was 7.8MB. The quality looked excellent. However, the clip was pretty static. If your clip has lots of action, that will stress the codec more and the overall visual quality will suffer. I bet I could drop the data another 100kbps or more for a talking head and still have very good quality. As Walter suggested, play with the settings.
Re: Never Mind... I was expecting the impossible! ;-) QT Rocks! by Michael Kellam on Apr 28, 2006 at 9:35:09 pm
John,
Yes, I'll still play with the settings, but I've gotten a similar result to the one you got. I used slightly higher limits but there is a lot of detail and more movement than a talking head. I got a 9.5 MB file that looked good even considering the detail/movement. I'm gonna go with it for now, but I'll keep testing to see if I can improve the wheel ;-)
Re: Never Mind... I was expecting the impossible! ;-) QT Rocks! by John Fishback on Apr 28, 2006 at 9:36:11 pm
Just tried the same settings with a constantly moving image and the results were very good. Make sure in video settings that the compressor setting is best. That enables 2-pass encoding which will give much better results, although, it slows down the encoding time.
Re: Never Mind... I was expecting the impossible! ;-) QT Rocks! by Bret Williams on Apr 29, 2006 at 3:04:26 am
One thing you guys may be forgetting is frame rate. If you drop the frame rate to 15, you can essentially cut the file size in half with the change being nearly imperceptible. Ok, we can see the slightly added jitter on large movements, but generally 15fps is the accepted web frame rate.
500 is a great rate too, because it'll start playing back instantly on DSL systems. H264 looks great, but if someone doesn't have QT7 they'll get an error and no info on why. QT doesn't parse the version number and codecs, etc. It just checks for a QT plugin. I've gone back to sorensen 3 usually for compatibility.
Some recent examples here... http://www.joanproduces.com/portfolio/new - they use sorensen 3 with mp3 as the audio, stereo 22khz 16bit I think. 15fps and 30sec equals about 1.7 mb.
We originally used h264 and they looked immaculate at 3/4 the data rate and file size. But most of the clients weren't able to see them. We didn't want to clutter up the screen with a "qt 7 required" logo or something so we'll wait until the world catches up.
Re: Never Mind... I was expecting the impossible! ;-) QT Rocks! by John Fishback on Apr 29, 2006 at 1:44:36 pm
Actually, if you just drop the frame rate and the data rate remains the same, you get the same size file with greater visual quality because the codec has half the pixels to worry about and applies the same data rate to those remaining pixels. If you want to save file size you have to also lower the data rate when you halve the frame rate. You need to experiment how much you can drop the data rate because the relationship between data rate and quality is not linear.
Re: Never Mind... I was expecting the impossible! ;-) QT Rocks! by Ed on Apr 29, 2006 at 4:18:17 pm
You could also look at Flip4Mac to create WM9 files. If you were happy with WMV on a PC, the F4M plug-in lets you create them on Macs.
Depending on who your audience is, it could be the best solution.
Ed
