Quicktime artifacts/distortion on a PC

T

TwinCitiesShooter

Active member
So my Quicktime file looks fine on my Mac, but when I view it on my PC, I get slight horizontal distortion artifacts when the camera pans (even slowly). I would just accept it as a lame aspect of my PC, except that I've watched plenty of Quicktime movies on the PC where there were no artifacts at any time. I've tried all sorts of settings in Compressor and Quicktime Conversion (quality, kbps, key frames, changed fps, etc.) -- nothing has an effect.

Any thoughts out there? You can view the Quicktime movie here: http://www.minnesotavideotours.com/demoqt.html

The artifacting/distortion I'm talking of is most pronounced in the second shot as the camera enters the house and pans from the dining room to the living room.

Any help would be greatly appreciated -- I'm totally stumped.
 
What compression codec is it originally? I'd also like to know the hardware specs of your PC, and what version of QT it's running. When you take it to the PC, how are you doing that? And are you playing it from a optical disc, or from the PC's hard drive?

The pan you speak of really is just way too fast for video, anyway. I'd have come up with some other transition rather than a brutal whip around like that.
 
Thanks for replying, BenB -- I'm glad to have someone experienced to speak with. Yes, that pan is too much, I bricked on that one. But then even on the slow pan of the living room in the next shot I'm seeing some artifacts, can't figure it out.

To answer your questions: I went from my FCP 5.1.2 timeline with both Compressor and Quicktime Conversion to a mov (tried 400 and 800kbps). Files played perfectly on my mac. I then used a thumbdrive to take the file from my mac to my HP PC, where I copied the file into my documents and then loaded into Dreamweaver. So I'm playing it from the hard drive. I have Quicktime 7.1.3 on my PC. The PC has an Intel Pentium processor, 512 MHz, 512 MB RAM.

Not only do the original mov files play perfectly on the mac, but when I access them online via the mac, they still play perfectly. What's weird is that I also converted the mov files to wmv WITHIN THE PC (using AVS Video Converter) and the artifacts/distortion goes away! It's only when playing the mov file on the PC that I get the problem... but again, it doesn't do that with other mov files (like movie trailers) that have much more motion.

Since I have you "on the line", if you have time for a second question, when I do convert to WMV I can't figure out how to get that progress notifier at the bottom on the WMV window that says "buffering" and gives a percentage on how much of the file is uploaded. Do you have to load files online in a certain way to get that? If you go to my website and click on the WMV link below the QT movie, you'll see the WMV window just stays black until enough of the clip has downloaded to play. Any experience with that?

Thanks again for your feedback!
 
PC sound really small and weak for HD files. The artifacts are simply lack of horsepower to playback, IMHO.

I hand WMV files off to clients to use as they like, I post QT H.264 for my own work. I'm not familiar with WMV as much as I wish I were. And I've never worked with AVX Video Converter on a PC. Not sure what to tell you on that one.

The WMV version, when I click on the link, looks just like any old QT movie on my Mac with FireFox 1.5 and Flip4Mac WMV Player installed.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top