What the heck are myspace trailers doing right for their compression?

S

sigpikul

Member
first post, long time lurker :)

myspace.com/thedarkknight

first off, the default version you see when you go on the page is high def, I'm assuming 480p, its loading incredibly fast, looks incredible good.

second off, they have a custom built player that allows you to select standard def, 480p, 720p, or even 1080p, any ideas or free services that you know of that gives your viewer that kind of flexibility? That would be very useful to a lot of us here that have digital content that we would like to distribute along the net, want it to look the best it can, but don't want to leave those with slower connections behind.

thirdly, this is a draft of a video I'm working on now:

http://www.vimeo.com/1198171

The song in it is unreleased so the audio (which was recorded live) is completely unmixed, but this is what I got when I took my source (pro res 4:2:2) and took it through 720p h.264 at 4500 kb/s a second, which is what I've read on this forum is the settings to use, then I uploaded it to vimeo. My h.264 file looks great, the vimeo one is crap, destroying all of my colors, making my focus racks unnoticeable, and generally making it look like I shot it on a cell phone instead of in high def. I've seen a few examples on this forum of people who have used the settings I followed, thrown it on vimeo, and it looked ALOT better than that, where am I screwing up? I'm using compressor 3, I read something about using h264 and putting it in a mpeg4 wrapper, I have no idea how to do that, I used h.264 and put it in a quicktime movie wrapper.

I'm making the transition to web content and I feel like I'm missing something.


Thanks everyone, I've learned alot from these forums in the last year or so, maybe eventually I can start giving back!
 
Think is, the dark night is a sponsored trailer. Myspace jumps it because it is...the dark night. You will never get that compression or streaming ability on myspace.
 
so your saying that by myspace some how beefing up their servers and prioritizing this particular video they can manage to allow an incredibly good looking video stream so fast? or is there a way I can duplicate those settings and get closer to that with my own server and player? or is it a combination of both?
 
sigpikul said:
so your saying that by myspace some how beefing up their servers and prioritizing this particular video they can manage to allow an incredibly good looking video stream so fast?
Click to expand...

that's what he's saying. myspace and any other website gives priority to videos that are actually paying them to be on their site. there's nothing you can do to get that.
 
Actually, after doing some SERIOUS hunting on google/apple manuals/hours of fiddling around with the settings on compression I ended up with some pretty comparable quality to what I see in apple trailers and myspace hd trailers and with pretty descent load time.

Check it:

http://www.kseraband.com/filmcredit.html

Here's what I did:

Audio - AAC 144kbps

Video - H.264 2200kbps Automatic Keyframes w/ Frame re-ordering checked.


Then here is what I think made all of the difference, on the tab in the compressor settings window next to the "encoder" panel is the "frame controls" panel.

On this, I changed the settings to:

Frame controls: On
Resize Filter: Best (statistical prediction)
Output Fields: Same as source
Deinterlace: Best (Motion Compensated)
Adaptive Details: Checked
Anti-Alias: 0
Details Level: 7
Rate Conversion: Best (High quality motion compensated)



I noticed that when I raised the detailing level that it was harder for my computer (and other peoples computer) to playback the file without skipping, so I found 7 to be the best compromise so far, but all of these settings have not been extensively tested so I'm sure we can find better ways to adjust it.

One BIG thing that you'll notice is that it takes A LOT longer for these video's to encode, so do a clip and optimize your settings and try to only encode the whole video once you have everything perfected. For the 3 minute video I made it took me about 3-4 hours to encode each time I did, and I'm not exactly running an old computer (2.2 ghz Macbook Pro 2gb Ram)

Tell me all your thoughts!
 
sigpikul said:
Actually, after doing some SERIOUS hunting on google/apple manuals/hours of fiddling around with the settings on compression I ended up with some pretty comparable quality to what I see in apple trailers and myspace hd trailers and with pretty descent load time.

Check it:

http://www.kseraband.com/filmcredit.html

Here's what I did:

Audio - AAC 144kbps

Video - H.264 2200kbps Automatic Keyframes w/ Frame re-ordering checked.


Then here is what I think made all of the difference, on the tab in the compressor settings window next to the "encoder" panel is the "frame controls" panel.

On this, I changed the settings to:

Frame controls: On
Resize Filter: Best (statistical prediction)
Output Fields: Same as source
Deinterlace: Best (Motion Compensated)
Adaptive Details: Checked
Anti-Alias: 0
Details Level: 7
Rate Conversion: Best (High quality motion compensated)



I noticed that when I raised the detailing level that it was harder for my computer (and other peoples computer) to playback the file without skipping, so I found 7 to be the best compromise so far, but all of these settings have not been extensively tested so I'm sure we can find better ways to adjust it.

One BIG thing that you'll notice is that it takes A LOT longer for these video's to encode, so do a clip and optimize your settings and try to only encode the whole video once you have everything perfected. For the 3 minute video I made it took me about 3-4 hours to encode each time I did, and I'm not exactly running an old computer (2.2 ghz Macbook Pro 2gb Ram)

Tell me all your thoughts!
Click to expand...

ya, that quality is superb, but it's not myspace or youtube, where you have a huge limit on file size. how many mbs was this file?

also what program did you use to encode it?
 
Ya my goal was to make a h.264 I could put on my own server and have similar quality to what I see on apple trailers and myspace trailers without a butt load of load time. On most computers I've tried this on the video only takes a few seconds to a minute tops to load to where it can start playing, and that is fine by me :)


I used apple's compressor 3 to make this with the settings I put above, but I'm sure you can find the settings you need to improve it in most good H.264 programs.
 
Thank you, I did a lot of searching to learn about the resizing techniques, the video is encoded at 2.2 mbits and I think it turned out great.

Now onto the second phase of this project:

Flash 9 Playback.

I came across some information when I was trying to figure out how to embed this quicktime file on the bands myspace (which I came to find is impossible due to some holes that myspace closed up in order to avert malicious attackers). So just hosting it on my own server and posting the quicktime is out of the question, but it looks like the second version of flash 9 now supports h.264.

I haven't quite figured out how the workflow works in order to create an incredible looking h.264 file that can be played with flash, but here is a great example of what its capabilities are:

http://www.flashvideofactory.com/test/demofullscreen345.html

That looks incredible.

Anyway I haven't found any straightforward answers on how to arrange this yet, I can't find anything about it in compressor 3, and everything on google that I've found alludes to some sort of licensing issues. It sounds like there is the possibility that the only way to playback h.264 files on a flash player is to use Adobe's proprietary server "Flash Media Server", which is about a thousand dollars. The way everything is making it sound right now is that you actually can't upload the file on your own server (which I already have and paid for) but you have to use a special server maintained by adobe. This doesn't sound right to me (not in a moral way, but it just doesn't sound like this is the truth, I would imagine there has to be a way to do this yourself).

I'll keep researching though, the information is kind of hard to come by, most of my results are news articles about how flash can now use h.264 instead of actual instructions on how to do this, and the articles that I do find that are relevant are very thick and hard to interpret, as if I'm missing some key information in between.

If anyone can shed some light on this, please do. If not I'll keep researching and report back what I find.
 
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