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trankillity
03-30-2006, 03:51 AM
Hi there everyone,
I've got a bit of a predicament with some high resolution video that I need to use in a project. The video is 1200x768 and needs to run smoothly on a relatively low-end machine (Celeron 2.4ghz or thereabouts). The videos themselves are no longer than 30 seconds each but it's imperative that they stay at this resolution and have no juttering or lag. It also needs to be encoded using one of the Quicktime codecs. Yet another issue is that it won't be running from the Quicktime player and will not have as much dedicated resources as Quicktime player can get. It will be running from within a Macromedia Director presentation.

I am using Premiere to export the video and have had bad experiences with Premiere's compression routines for Quicktime in the past so it may actually be Premiere causing these issues but so far the only option I've found is Sorenson 3 at the rather low rate of 1500kb/s. This produces a lot of artifacting and is fairly unacceptable. Any data rate above 2000kb/s produces lots of juttering.

Does anyone else have any suggestions for other codecs for this large a video file? Will H.264 decode reliably on such a low-end machine with such a large resolution? I'm also keen to know what people think is a good audio codec to use as I've had very little experience with Quicktime and audio.

If there's anything else that you need to know about the restrictions of the project to better inform me then please ask and I'll get back to you ASAP.

Regards,
Sebastian
2a03
03-30-2006, 05:32 AM
H.264 really stresses the CPU so it probably wont work on those Celeron machines... How bout trying quicktime with good old PhotoJpeg compression at %70?...looks pretty good and doesnt kill the CPU.
trankillity
03-30-2006, 06:20 AM
Unfortunately the performance on PhotoJPEG and MotionJPEG are worse than Sorenson. Guess I'll have to experiment with some other options and see what I can come up with. Might try an application other than Premiere too to see if it's exporting junk with the movie.
Kai01W
03-30-2006, 01:37 PM
Quicktime performes very poorly on Windows (thanks alot apple :rolleyes:). Especially with the jpeg compressions. Try windows media if thats an option you can use within this project.

-k
nexx_au
03-30-2006, 01:59 PM
Hey Sebastian, still at UQI?

I would definitely look to another program for encoding. I've found Premier gives terrible results when it comes to Quicktime. I've encoded Sorenson & Quicktime H263 vids that are 3x the size of AVI's I've encoded using other H263/MPEG4-ASP codes (such as XviD) and they still look worse. But I've never bothered finding anything else because it hasnt been a huge issue for me.

Even still, 2000kbps is a low bitrate for that resolution. I'm not sure if Quicktime & Director support it, but anamorphic video might be a good idea. 848x768 with a pixel aspect of 1.422.

-Mark
Ian Jones
04-01-2006, 11:00 AM
Hey Seb and Mark,

Have you tried http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html it's pretty cool. Maybe it'll encode a little nicer.
trankillity
04-01-2006, 11:10 AM
Bwaha. I was the one who told you about SUPER Ian (after G-ride told me about it) :P

And no, not at UQI anymore Mark. Finished up there last year. Remind me who you are if you would. EDIT: Nevermind. Just read your profiley thing. Heya Mark ;)

As for the original topic, I have discovered that the only viable codec is Sorenson3 as it can handle the extremely large frame size. There is some compression artifacts but it's fairly smooth on the target system. And yes, Premiere was the issue. Exporting a 4.5gb source file from Premiere as Sor3 resulted in a ~500mb file with lots of playback issues. Exporting the same file from Quicktime Pro standalone results in a < 100mb file with some artifacting but no playback issues.
Ian Jones
04-01-2006, 02:51 PM
hehe, I forgot. :)
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