Degraded Quicktime Footage

P

phrige

Member
I finally found the culprit to an ongoing problem Ive noticed.
I was watching the same footage (from 7d) on Windows Media Player and also then played it in Quicktime. The Quicktime loooked Horrible, it really stood out when played back to back. I was wondering what the deal was because a lot of the stuff I shoot just looks like higher end SD when played through quicktime. Doesn't have the nice HD progressive look and feel. Its pixelated, shmeary, all around crap, even when reduced to 1/8th monitor size. While Media Player when nearly full screen plays the video very crisp, smooth and nice.

What Gives?

Are my quicktime settings messed up? Though I've noticed this problem across 3 different computers I've watched my raw files on. 1 P.C. 2 forms of Mac. Macbook and iMac.
 
I'd bet money that the quicktime file (whatever that means) was encoded badly. So what codec and bitrate is the quicktime file?
 
It could be several things. What NLE are you using? There's a setting in Quicktime preferences to enable FCP Color compatibility. This will more closely aligns the gamma of Quicktime and FCP.

FCP doesn't really care about how your computer monitor is set up so if you don't tell it to care it comes out all washed out and wonky. It only cares about the video out to a computer monitor if you tell it to care, and it only matters to video that you've exported from FCP. If video looks washed out on any Mac after exporting from FCP then its probably a preferences thing.

Also, often times when Quicktime H.264 is streamed off of a Windows server it looks like crap. Thats an Apple developed H.264 and Microsoft developed an M4V compatibility hate sort of thing.

Depending on your footage sometimes you just have to choose the path you want to go down and adjust for it.
 
Thanks for the replys. File itself whether AVI or straight from 7d .mov (those are the only two i've tested) had differences when just using standalone quicktime. Which is what i found odd, since a certain file of a certain resolution should play the same no matter what the player is.

I'll have to do some more testing with it on my friends' macs. Are there any other mac video players that are worthwhile other than quicktime? I believe I heard that you can download a version of Windows Media Player for mac.

I almost thought this was a well known thing that i had just found out about. interesting how no one else has really had this problem. I'll look deeper into it and if it turns out quicktime is playing the files poorly even on the macs, then ill post some screenshots.
 
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