compressing quicktime movies

scorsesefan

scorsesefan

Veteran
trying to upload 30 second commercial I shot and edited on FCP to the DVX sight. How should I save it in Quicktime? It takes forever whenever I try to upload it to a sight.
Thanks
 
Once you edit the movie (in the DV format) you need to compress it before uploading it, as the original DV movie is too big (DV is a 25 Mbit/sec format). There's a wide range of choices to get your movie down to smaller size that only requires a data rate in the range of at least 400 kbit/sec but probably not much more than 800 kbit/sec.

For starters, I'd suggest you try the video iPod pre-set (available in QuickTime Pro) that will provide a fairly compact 320x240 movie that plays well, looks great, and is quite small. No fuss, no muss, no thinking about all the audio and video setting options.

If you have Apple's Compressor or the open-source ffmpegX to compress the movie, there are many settings to choose from, the two Video iPod pre-set settings are a good start, either make a small quarter-screen movie (320x240) or a full-screen movie (640x480). Both Compressor and ffmpegX have pre-sets for video iPod, so it's easy to start with one of those settings, does not require much messing around and as a bonus your movie will be playable on a Video iPod to boot. The video iPod settings involve the use of the H.264 codec which offers very high image quality for a relatively small file size.
 
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DVX100Shooter said:
so your saying you should use the ipod option to compress video for the web? I have not heard that one before.
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Basically the iPod option is a 320x240 (or the new 640x480 option in Compressor) movie using the H.264 compressor. This gives you the best image quality in a small file size, bar none. It works for web video, however, not everyone has QuickTime installed.

On the other hand (just 'cause I like to argue with myself sometimes) Flash is becoming the de factor standard for web video. If you want to post a single file for any visitor, go with Flash. Something like 98% of Web users in the United States have the Flash Player installed with roughly half having the latest version, Flash 8, which offers spectacular image quality.
 
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I wouldn't suggest the iPod preset for 320x240 video for the web. For iPod its great but they have the bitrate awful high for such small video (obviously so it looks outstanding on the iPod screen). Settings for great 320x240 video in QT.

.mov - 320x240 - H264
Bitrate: 285kb/s (or 300)
Optimized for streaming (depends on you)
Keyframe: 300 for 30fps video, or 72 for 24fps video
Audio: AAC, Stereo (or mono if theres not much music), 41000khz, 64-96 bitrate.

Should give you about 3MB a min or so which is perfect for the web.

Enjoy!

- Kyle
 
What does it mean when it asks about keyframes? I understand keyframes in editing, but not in exporting.
 
BennisHahn said:
Keyframes provide subsequent frames with information in an encoding system that uses GOP (group of pictures).
Click to expand...

Keyframe is a frame that is "standalone" generally, right? so it does not rely on information from previous or future frames, and generally has "more information" in it.
 
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