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Saturday, August 02, 2008

Video Compression Workshop – Helpful Advice

Need to get your video delivered to your audience?  Then there’s probably going to be some compression involved.  Don’t let hardware or software get in your way. Let’s take a common sense approach to getting your video out there. 

Pick Your Power
There are tons of compression tools out there, but the pro apps offer important features like batch processing, multiple architecture support, and customizable presets.  The five most popular options are:

Apple Compressor (www.apple.com) Bundled free with Final Cut Pro or DVD Studio Pro.  However it can’t output some Window’s oriented formats and it is occasionally cranky (requiring restarts, trashing preferences, and even re-installs to get back on track).

Canopus ProCoder (www.canopus.com) a versatile PC-only solution for encoding video in a variety of formats.  It offers both a guided and an expert mode to setting up your jobs.

Autodesk Cleaner and Cleaner XL (www.discreet.com) The granddaddy of encoding utilities.  It’s suffered from changing ownership several times and hasn’t seen much development lately. 

Telestream Episode and Episode Pro (www.flip4mac.com) This product offers hooks into Apple Compressor and offers a variaety of additional formats that Mac users need.

Sorenson Squeeze (www.sorenson.com) An easy to use compression utility that also unlocks some specialty formats like Flash Video.  Version 4.1 (a free upgrade) build in support for Windows Media files on the Mac Platform by using Flip4Mac (not a free upgrade - $99/$179).

Videosquish
Looking for a smaller download?  The biggest changes you can make are window size and frame rate. These savings are before you’ve even gotten around to applying the compression algorithms.  Pro’s will often compress the video to half size, but then flag the players to automatically show the video at 200% magnification.  Large window, but tiny files.

SCREEN SIZE
Half Screen 75% reduction in file size
Quarter Screen 94% reduction in file size

Your video file is likely recorded at approximately 30 fps.  This is needed for a television display, but not important for most Internet or CD-ROM video. 

FRAME RATE – 30 fps material
15 fps 50% reduction in file size
10 fps 66% reduction in file size

These file savings can be combined, which can result in huge savings of download time or disk space.

Hip to be Square
There’s a good chance you are working with non-square pixels in your digital video clip.  Computer pixels are square in shape, and you’ll need to compensate.  Here are some of the most common sizes.

4X3 Aspect Ratio 16X9 Aspect Ratio
640 X 480 640 X 360
480 X 360 480 X 270
320 X 240 320 X 180
240 X 180 240 X 135
160 X120 160 X 90

Post Production •

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hello

on the subject of compression....

i am trying to play back a 4K file…
basically 6 HDV clips merged into one movie 3840x3240 pixels

i have tried AIC, photo-jpeg, motion jpeg, MP4, H264, MPEG2, compression
and have had no luck

anybody out there able to play clips at that resolution ? and what settings/compression are you using? and how fast of a machine are you using?

THANKS!
bill

more details, for the curious-- i want to play back 6 HD streams to 6 HD projectors, through the DVI ports ....
3 video cards with 2 outputs each
my understanding is that the GPU on the video card is NOT used for this video de-compression, only the CPU ( on OSX quicktime)
so the video cards are not the restriction, but the CPU’s
I basically figure on buying an 8core machine with an internal raid and run either OSX or linux, depending what works better
but don’t want to buy a machine and find that it doesn’t work
here is a reduced size version of the clip
http://media.bardo.com.au/combined6waters.html

and yes, i could go old school and buy 6 HD players ( like blue ray or such) and sync them with a external pulse timecode sync, etc-- but i’m trying to get away from that now-- and they don’t always have that great of sync anyway-- plus or minus 4 frames is not that grooovy… and will cost waaay more than a nice 8 core machine…

Posted by billS  on  08/05  at  04:04 PM

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Hello

I have i mp4 video with screensize 640*480 that i have to adjust to screensize 320*180.

How do i do that ?

Posted by  on  10/04  at  01:32 AM

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