help me make some h.264 .mp4s quickly please?

Xtopher

Xtopher

Well-known member
This article helps explain the frustration we have been having at work for the past 9 months... the bigger we grow, the more videos we have to export and straight from Final Cut it takes FOR-EV-ER (think sandlot). Not to mention it ties up FCP, so we have to do all exporting at night.

(I didn't write the article, I just came across it)
 
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“O.K. Well just change the extension when it comes out,” you say. Well the problem is that the mp4/m4v/mov gets data written into the header of the file to specify what format it is. If it gets changed QT Pro cannot recognize it
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QT Pro recognizes it fine on my machine. I can rename any h.264 .mov file from Compressor to .mp4 and it works fine afterwards. Also, you can change the extension right in Compressor so you don't have to do it afterwards.

The trouble with Compressor is that the settings in Compressor only go down to 1000kbps.
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You can change the data rate to whatever you want. Once you've applied a particular preset, press the "Settings" button next to "Video" in the Encoder tab. Once you've made your changes you can save it as your own preset so you don't have to repeat the process.

With regards to the speed of encoding, h.264 is indeed a very demanding codec. If you have an older machine, upgrading to a recent Mac Pro will speed up your encoding time dramatically. Also make sure that you configure QMaster services for distributed processing for Compressor (in the Mac System Settings) so that you use all your CPU cores (if you have a multiple cores) when encoding. You can also setup multiple machines and let them handle the compression without tying your main system.

As a reference, I have an 8 core 3 Ghz Mac Pro with 4GB of ram and it takes close to real time to encode an SD clip to h.264 using the LAN Compressor preset.

Hope this helps.
 
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One thing that I have done to save time is exported the video in the same settings as I edited it in (Export to QuickTime Movie), if you don't need to render, then it should take a little more than real time to export to a new file.

Once you have that exported file, you can drop that into Compressor & FCP will still be free.

If that takes up too much processor, then maybe look into getting a Mac Mini as your dedicated Compressor machine. If you have the cash, just get a new Mac Pro, which would work better, but I would think there is a good chance that a Mac Minis could be a better bang for the buck.


Side note: I think compressor is a good step forward, but still needs a lot of work. For a lot of things it works great. But I have gotten pretty upset trying to get something in HD from FCP to play on a PS3 w/o using anything third party. You'd wish that Apple & Sony would both be grown up enough to play nice, but like you said in your article that it is rare when h.264 = h.264. Heaven forbid codecs, file extensions & wrappers be easy to work with! ...sigh... it is sloooowly getting better as the years pass, even when it feels like things are getting worse too...
 
Cools, I tried to export the video the way you said, a couple of months ago and ran into problems getting the video to play on our player. It would buffer forever and never play until I clicked it again. I have no clue why it would do that.

I'm gonna try to export it as a h.264 quicktime as opposed to MPEG4 and see if it gives me better results.
 
What player are you using? Maybe it's a setting or a problem with the player itself and not the H.264 file?
 
its a player that our company co created, the main programmer said that in theory it should work to change the file format in compressor so I am going to try that again but start with Quicktime>h.264>then change the file extension to .mp4 instead of whatever i did last time, which was obviously weird. I will update once I upload the streams, but it wouldn't surprise me if it was a player issue at this point. Thanks!
 
Ok so I did a Quicktime H.264 and changed the file extension to .mp4 and it worked! it even works on our site! the ONLY thing I don't like is there seems to be a little bit of aliasing on the text.... I turned the anti aliasing to 100 and down to 5 and it doesn't seem to make a dif.... I may just have to do something different with text unless anyone has any suggestions?? Thanks!
 
Is there a reason why these videos through compressor look worse than straight out of Final Cut Pro?
 
Ok i GOT IT! i played around with frame controls and finally got a setting that works! better than Squeeze and better than Quicktime conversion and definitely better than Quicktime Pro. Now I can utilize Final Cut Server! Thanks for the help guys.
 
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