Quicktime .... the worst technology ever spawned ?

J

jackal2513

Active member
Does anyone here actually "get" quicktime, or understand it ?

I have a couple of quicktimes here that are full movies.... they are aroudn 800mb in size, same sort of size that I have lots of DivX or mpeg encoded files which play fine. But fire up the quicktime player and it crawls to a snails pace and becomes very unresponsive. Try and scrub through the movie and you really have no chance at all.... in fact you cant scrub, you can only click on eth timeline somewhere and several minutes later the player will update the frame .... Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz

But I do digress. My current problem is that I have to make a quicktime of something for a client because that's what they requested and try as I might I cannot get anything decent out of After Effects. I have tried Cinepak and Sorensen. Why people bang on about Sorensen to me is anybodys guess. I have this 60 second piece of film compressed at full resolution under both DivX and WMV and at aroudn 20mb at first glance it looks almost uncompressed ! Yet a 40mb Sorenson movie looks so riducously compressed its laughable .... itr almost looks like the movie was 1/10th of the proper resolution and then scaled up to make one big huge blocky mess. Seriously, some shots you can't even make out whats in the frame and what the picture is, let alone any detail. Its laughable that it can even call itself a proper form of compression.

ROFL... as I type I have just generated a 90MB cinepak compressed mov and its also unbelievably blocky, unacceptably so. Also, if theres a moving camer or stuff moving in frame sometimes bits of it don't move as if the compression algorithms are trying to prevent portions of the frame moving. Just to repeat, the 20mb divx file or teh wmv loosk for the most part like uncompressed footage.

So my question is, is it possible to make quicktime perform in the same way as other forms of compression and vastly improve the quality of the compression that I am seeing whilst at the same time reducing the filesize by up to a factor of 4 ?
 
I used to hate quicktime, but I've grown to like it.

What are your compression settings? That will have a lot to do with it.

I remember when I was trying to export a quicktime for a client and I ran into the same problem as you. Huge file sizes and crappy compression. Then I had my friend take a look at it, he tweaked it and it turned out really nice. I also believe that the program has a lot to do with it. You'd be better off exporting the entire file from AE as an AVI and then getting a program specifically for media conversion and running it through that. Adobe's got some strange and inefficient compression techniques that I think messes up the video.
 
well i take your point but this is the latest version fo AE and also I have the latest quicktime pro installed. If there are bad legacy compression techniques in teh software then remove them surely ?

The settings I am using are medium quality in cinepak (setting a data rate with cinepak does absolutely nothing .... so thats another bug in itself !). This produces a 90mb file that is completely unwatchable.

Sorensen 3 I am setting a data rate of about 200 k which is ridiculous but its teh only was to keep the filesize done. Even then the movie comes out at around 40mb and is again completely unwatchable so bad that peoples faces in the movie look like a collection of 6 or 7 huge pixels. It really did have me laughing here. And bear in mind that is still a bigger filesize than my little divx movie that looks pretty much uncompressed all the way through !


lol ... i just looked at the VOB on a dvd i made of it and thats only 90mb !!! At this rate quicktime needs about half a gigabyte to get the same quality as a dvd !
 
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Quicktime isn't your problem, your compressors are. Sorenson isn't made for full-res encoding, and it's not as sophisticated as DivX. Try doing a comparable MPEG-4 quicktime encode. Or, if your client is hip to the now, try it in H.264. I think once you do that you'll start complaining about how ugly DiVX is instead.
 
Tried that already...... mp4 file came out at 60mb and its still not as good looking as the divx and wmv encoded files.


Anyone else have other ideas ?
 
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ok, an H.264 first of all removes all the contrast from the movie so it looks all milky... and then its 59mb. But here's the real clanger, thats at half resolution, a measly 360x200. Pathetic ... I thought this was supposed to be some clever technology ?

Nope, still distinctly unimpressed .... nothing has even got half as close to my 20mb wmv and divx full res files.
 
I would toy around with the Animation codec, it's file sizes are bigger, but I think you can mess with the settings and get a decent file. What's the max size this thing can be and what is the footage (DV, HD, film?)
 
dougspice said:
Sorenson isn't made for full-res encoding, and it's not as sophisticated as DivX.
Click to expand...



so basically its old and unsophisticated... so why not get rid of it ? Its clearly rubbish so whats it still doing in the options list
 
jackal2513 said:
so basically its old and unsophisticated... so why not get rid of it ? Its clearly rubbish so whats it still doing in the options list
Click to expand...

Legacy, and I'm sure some people still use it...don't know why.
 
more experiments with H.264. It really is horrendous. A 35b movie file with horridly comporessed sound and the picture quality is like a Jpeg at quality 2. Awful.

I am no microsoft fan but I have yet to see a quicktime movie thats even vaguely close in quality to a dual-pass WMV at equivalent filesize.

At this rate, I am going to need soemthg like a 200mb quicktime to match what I already have as a 25mb .avi
 
Jackal I was in the same boat as you. My quicktime files looked terrible when rendered in After Effects. I couldn't get the settings right. I got a hold of quicktime pro...and the difference was night and day. I just rendered out an H.264, 1 minute file at 600x320...and it was 15mb. The quality is excellent.
 
Well, compression size isn't the whole battle. There's got to be a reason why pretty much every professional media outlet on the planet prefers Quicktime, right? I know I certainly do.

Maybe everything you've said is true, but I'm personally not sweating the difference when I consider the other factors. It's obviously untrue that H.264 is an ugly codec or that it's impossible to get crystal-clear results from it. People are doing it.

I think the problem must be that you are using After Effects as your compression engine. That's no good. You should be exporting lossless out of AE and then doing your compression in a dedicated engine. Sorenson3 was a great codec for a long time. Nowadays it's outdated (but still incredibly widely supported). That doesn't have anything to do with the fact that the results you'll get out of something like Sorenson Squeeze are going to beat what you get out of After Effects.
 
For the last thing I did, I rendered a QuickTime version and a WMV version using Sorenson Squeeze 4. The quality was comparable and the filesizes were about the same. It can be done. (I'm talking the separate Sorenson program, not the codec as an option in other programs).

On the other hand, when I do a WMV, it's just Click and it's done. With QuickTime, I have to fiddle with it to make it look as good at a reasonable filesize.

As for why pro media places want QuickTime? Apparently, they've been stuck in a time eddy for the past 10 years and never got the word that other formats are just as good, if not better.
 
What's a professional media outfit ? The only professional media outfits I know of output stuff either to DigiBeta, D1, HDCAM, 35mm film or IMAX. Quicktime is a compressed format for small internet movies is it not ? Its not even the mainstay of the editing world where compressed placeholders are required .... rather, avid is.

If a leading piece of software long since been associated with apple mac and quicktime (after effects and permiere) can only compress a movie thats comparable to a divx/wmv with 5-10 times the filesize, using up to date QT 7.0.4 codes as per apples installation, then if I were apple I'd be concerned. Why do you need some sort of special tool ? After effects will ouput avi's, wmv's, tiffs, jpegs etc.. no problem.
 
Something is wrong with your settings. Are you using 2-pass encoding? What are your keyframe settings? You should be able to get something pretty close to size/quality of WMV using H264, if you're not, something's wrong IMHO.
 
there are hardly any settings in after effects for teh various compressors
just limit data rate (which does nothing when using mpeg4) and also setting a key frame and then a quality slider.

I guess it must be after effects, it cant make decent quicktimes.
 
Wouldn't be surprising. It also can't import AVIs *at all* on a Mac. How infuriating is that?

As for "professional media outlets", I was referring to every single movie trailer, reel, or portfolio on the web. You might see a few in Flash, mostly ad agencies, but those are rare.
 
jackal2513 said:
ok, an H.264 first of all removes all the contrast from the movie so it looks all milky... and then its 59mb. But here's the real clanger, thats at half resolution, a measly 360x200. Pathetic ... I thought this was supposed to be some clever technology ?

Nope, still distinctly unimpressed .... nothing has even got half as close to my 20mb wmv and divx full res files.
Click to expand...

You're kidding right? First, H264 does not remove the contrast and ours never look milky. Even the PC guys we work with admit that our H264 files make the WMV look like crap... and they are smaller and require less bandwidth to stream.

There is nothing wrong with Quicktime...
 
H.264 is bloody awesome. Quicktime is fine. There's something wrong with your settings or the way the app is working with it.
 
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