FCP 720P HD to Apple TV

G

gary2yuk

Active member
Anyone here try this yet? I tried doing a search to no avail..

If so, how does it look compared to putting HD footage onto a DVD.. I guess the question is, does Apple TV's 720P HD streaming capabilities make it worthy of a purchase?

also, I noticed it has to be H264.. how bad does this affect the quality?
 
You can stream up to 5mbit H.264 at 1280x720 to the Apple TV. It took me a while to figure it all out because the thing is very fussy if the format the video is in is not correct. It does look great on a large HD TV though.

That said, it is just a Mac SuperMini with a 1GHz Pentium M inside, so people have added mods to it allowing you to view DivX, Xvid videos and so forth. Some have even installed the regular version of Tiger on there, but the 256mb of RAM it has onboard doesn't really let it take off and fly that well.
 
I have bought the Apple TV and generally, I like it. I'm using it to keep a library of reels to show clients and I'm now installing it at a client I do a lot of work for so they can view and show footage at a decent quality with relative ease. The general public won't see much of the compression artifacts in the shadows and grain that a shooter would see so it works as long as you don't have a picky or hyper sensitive client. :-)

The 5000/mbit limit though I thought was an artifical thing and the preset for Compressor's Apple TV settings. There is definitely stuff (leaves in forest, grass, water, etc) that I would want more bandwidth than the 5k because the details will otherwise get mushy or noisy or blocky.
I noticed many of the Apple movie trailers come in at a bitrate of over 5mbit/s which I though was a limitation for the AppleTV...a lot of them are at 5500/kbit/sec. (Check out the Harry Potter trailer) Have you also noticed that MANY of the Apple Trailers are not available on Apple TV? Don't know how the trailers get blessed for AppleTV and which ones don't.

I actually have made my own movie at 7000kbit/sec and it worked. But I made one at 8000kbit/sec and it didn't. (Through QT export). Compressor's AppleTV settings seem to limit you to that 5000 setting.

Dmitry is right though that there's some hit and miss with the settings. Compressor AppleTV settings don't always give you what they think they will and I don't know why some of my movies can play at above 5k/sec and others cannot.

5k is just too low for vignettes, gradations and the aforementioned shadows detail. Even in something as high end as the Harry Potter trailer, you can see definite banding in gradations.

Anyway, that's my 2 cents.
 
compared to DVD

compared to DVD

Thanks for your thoughts guys

How about when compared to DVD output.. definitely noticably better?

am I correct in assuming HD to apple TV output it slightly better than DVD output (since you have to downrez to SD) but not as good as HD broadcast quality?
 
I think it has to do more with the fact that the 1GHz processor isn't capable of decoding video beyond that limit. We will probably see 1080p once they upgrade the CPU.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top