apple quicktime trailer quality?

doondoon

doondoon

Well-known member
trying to get my HVX footage compressed for the web without killing the quality... and without the file being so big that the average joe will lose patience and move on without watching it.

I've noticed that the HD apple trailers (under quicktime tab on web) are always very high quality. Much better than I've seen elsewhere. In fact I've brought them into a FCP timeline and played back on my 26" panny hd monitor and they hold up surprisingly well. I also like the fact that you can choose 1080P, 720P and so on.
How is that done?

The other BIG factor is that the download times are very very fast considering the quality.
My question is how do they do that?? I wonder what they're using to compress the trailers? And is it so fast because of there fast servers or what?

cheers,
michael
 
uhrgl said:
How do you save them locally to drop into FCP? Do you have QT pro?
Click to expand...

you can often get them out of the Browser cache. Don´t know about the apple site, but many other sites "allow" that.
 
For the love of Pete. I tried the Firefox and QT caches on OSX -- it's like looking for a hay colored needle in a haystack. I want to kick the Mac (from the Mac/PC commercials) in the balls.
 
I believe they use the QT Pro codec, h.264 for all the trailers. That's what I use for my stuff. You have to play around with the quality settings a bit to get it right, but I think that's the only way. Also you have to select "Prepare for Internet Streaming - Fast Start."

Here's one of my HVX videos that I did that I used that method, and had pretty good results--

http://www.nvaleri.com/web3/cfaIndex.html

I also would expect that the apple servers are probably well optimized for streaming. My web service isn't that great, but the download is sufficiently fast enough, I think.
 
nvsurly

wow... what a fab piece. i loved the combination of music and slo/mo visuals..one of best combinations i've seen... very sinister overall feeling , .. i want more !!

like the opening of some film BEFORE some tragic event takes place.

well done.
 
The caches are easy to find, if you know how to use the UNIX command line. Well, easy for me to say, a retired IT Egnineer with a UNIX specialty. There's a reason why UNIX is still the most secure, powerful OS ever created.

When a QT movie loads up, and is downloadable, you should have a triagle in the lower right corner, click on it, a menu appears. IF the movie is downloadable, there will be two Save As options. It's as simple as that. You shouldn't need QTPro.

Apple's clips play so well because they are running QuickTime Server on their servers. If you're ISP (mine is westhost.com and they have it installed) has QuickTime Streaming Server installed, your QT files should simply stream, if you encoded them for streaming. Otherwise, it has to be a download, meaning you have to wait longer to see it play.
 
I have gotten....

I have gotten....

the best results using the Apple Motion Jpeg codec.....
cant remember if I used Apple Motion Jpeg A or B though.....
Anyways it has produced crisp sharp clean video for me....
 
doondoon said:
I've noticed that the HD apple trailers (under quicktime tab on web) are always very high quality. Much better than I've seen elsewhere. In fact I've brought them into a FCP timeline and played back on my 26" panny hd monitor and they hold up surprisingly well. I also like the fact that you can choose 1080P, 720P and so on.
How is that done?
Click to expand...

The book "QuickTime for the Web" by Steven Gulie has a discussion on this topic written by one of the people at Apple who does/ did the compression for the trailers. The book was published in 2001, so it may be a little outdated (and covers only SD I believe).

--Jeremy
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top