Website Reel/What codec/H.264

[Ian Coad]

Editing, computers, codec stuff is a little foreign to me as I'm less techy than I should be. That being said, I'm trying to work out what format my final edited reel should be in. I'd like to squeeze as much quality out of the image as I can. I'd also like a compression that's pretty accurate to the original and wont undermine the image. From what I understand a good choice would be edit and export in H.264.

 

Other questions regarding this:

 

1. I'd like the video to play 2.40 - without black matted bars above and below the frame. Does anyone know how to do this in Avid or Final Cut Pro (preferable).

2. If the DVD copies are H.264 is it a bad idea to pull from these - will this compromise the quality OR should I import from the d5 masters?

3. I plan to have the website play a quicktime - not a youtube or vimeo video. Anything in particular I should know about this and H.264 or any other favorable export format?

 

Thanks very much guys, I look forward to hearing back from you.

 

- Ian.

[Phil Rhodes]

Why not use vimeo? It works, quality is reasonable, and the player is reasonably attractive.

[Edgar Dubrovskiy]

http://philipbloom.net/2010/03/16/how-to-export-and-upload-235-video-to-vimeo/

[Tadeusz Kieniewicz]

I'm just exportin my showreel and codec H.264 looks for me very desaturated than orginal clip. Apple Pro res 422 is good but not working on youtube so now i'm exporting it to XDCAM EX 1080p25 35 VBR cuz most of material was shooting on EX 1 and 3.

 

Hope it helps.

 

Ted.

[Ian Coad]

Why not use vimeo? It works, quality is reasonable, and the player is reasonably attractive.

 

i don't see a lot of vimeo clips on professional websites, i dunno, i don't mean any disrespect, but i don't know that it has as professional of connotations as direct steaming. certainly i'd do it if that little vimeo logo and its signature features didn't show up. just my opinion though.

[Garrett Shannon]

 

1. I'd like the video to play 2.40 - without black matted bars above and below the frame. Does anyone know how to do this in Avid or Final Cut Pro (preferable).

2. If the DVD copies are H.264 is it a bad idea to pull from these - will this compromise the quality OR should I import from the d5 masters?

3. I plan to have the website play a quicktime - not a youtube or vimeo video. Anything in particular I should know about this and H.264 or any other favorable export format?

 

 

1. I would advise using compressor. In my experience the compression looks better when using compressor instead of FCP. Depending what version you have you need to either set the source dimensions to 2.40 and then set the export size to a 2.4 ratio. If you only set the export ratio to 2.40 then it will take your entire 4:3 or 16:9 frame and squeeze it into 2.40 aspect ratio. In the newest version I think you can just select export ratio and then check retain aspect ratio and it will do the crop automatically.

 

2. Start off the D5 if you can. Better looking footage in = better looking footage out.

 

3. If you plan to stream it from your website make sure you select compression settings for streaming not download and select the fast start - compressed header option.

 

I usually use the Apple Trailers videos as a guideline and the 1080 trailers come in between 8 and 25Mb/s (Megabits) so your 720 transcodes should come in between 3 and 12Mb/s. Use this as a baseline and then it is up to you to decide how big the file size should be compared to the quality and how long it will take people visiting your website to download the video. If it’s so big that it takes 5 min to download nobody is going to watch it. Same thing for streaming; if people can't start watching within 5 seconds and continue to watch the entire video without waiting for buffering they are likely to turn it off.

 

My 2 cents anyway.

 

Check out my website http://garrettshannon.com if you want and download my videos to compare compression settings. Feel free to shoot me an email if you have more questions.

 

 

-Cheers

[Anthony Brooks]

I dont use mp4 at all on my site. All of my content is converted to flv. The files are much smaller, yield the same internet viewing quality and play faster.

 

www.inairfilms.com

[Phil Rhodes]

What sort of FLV? Compressed using what?

[Guest Stephen Murphy]

I spent years messing around with h264 quicktimes or FLV flash files and was happy with the results but for the latest revision to my site I've gone with vimeo embeds. So much easier to deal with and saves me some storage on my site. Worth a thought!

[Sean Conaty]

I dont use mp4 at all on my site. All of my content is converted to flv. The files are much smaller, yield the same internet viewing quality and play faster.

 

www.inairfilms.com

 

Anthony,

I myself am a fan of using FLV as well. Unfortunately, when exporting, I'm having the hardest time retaining quality (most notably in the blacks) and have noticed quite a difference between the pristine images on your site and those on mine. My standard workflow is as follows. Please let me know if you've got any suggestions that might remedy:

 

-Final Cut Sequence settings at 1280x720 - ProRes422HQ

-Send to Compressor @ 640x480 - ProRes422HQ

-Convert to FLV w/ Adobe Media Encoder

 

I've done a few tests and permutations (FCP sequence setting with different codecs, resizing at different stages, higher VBR in Media Encoder, etc.) to absolutely no avail. I'd love any suggestions.

 

-Sean

[Phil Rhodes]

The elephant in the corner here is that just saying "It's an FLV" isn't enough information. FLV files can contain any of several codecs, from the original FLV1 compressor (certainly not competitive with h.264) all the way through the VP series (increasingly competitive with h.264). This is, for what it's worth, also the case with Quicktime, MXF and AVI files.

 

Unfortunately, nice little computer programs which have compression presets called "good", "better", "bestest" and "super-duper", because they can't bring themselves to call anything "low", aren't really capable of describing these sorts of irritating technical minutiae. This is, however, why you can easily end up with two programs produce two "FLV files" which are the same size but give you wildly different results.

 

 

P

[Bruce Greene]

Editing, computers, codec stuff is a little foreign to me as I'm less techy than I should be. That being said, I'm trying to work out what format my final edited reel should be in. I'd like to squeeze as much quality out of the image as I can. I'd also like a compression that's pretty accurate to the original and wont undermine the image. From what I understand a good choice would be edit and export in H.264.

 

Other questions regarding this:

 

1. I'd like the video to play 2.40 - without black matted bars above and below the frame. Does anyone know how to do this in Avid or Final Cut Pro (preferable).

2. If the DVD copies are H.264 is it a bad idea to pull from these - will this compromise the quality OR should I import from the d5 masters?

3. I plan to have the website play a quicktime - not a youtube or vimeo video. Anything in particular I should know about this and H.264 or any other favorable export format?

 

Thanks very much guys, I look forward to hearing back from you.

 

- Ian.

 

Ian, I've done exactly as you are asking for on my website.

 

I've just checked the settings for 2.4:1 QT H.264 that I used:

 

760x337 pixels. 1000kbits/sec. 23.98fps. I used AAC for audio compression to help keep the file size down a little.

 

To prepare the file I cropped in FCP to the proper shape and pixel dimensions so that I wouldn't waste bandwidth on black bars.

 

Exported using "quicktime conversion".

 

If you go to my website, the trailer from "Close Enemy" was copied from a 1080 QT file I downloaded online, color corrected, and resized. It has a bit of compression artifacts but is not too bad. Others are from Apple ProRes or DVCproHD originals.

 

www.brucealangreene.com

 

Good luck and if you could provide me with feedback about how the clips play over the net on your computer, I would find that helpful.