Compressing after rendering

[Philippe Gosselin]

Hi Glenn


So what is your suggestion then? I assume it is to offer it in wmv and qt. Well the thing is my webspace is given to me for free (after making a couple of video for them first) so I don't want to abuse and have my webmasters think that I am ripping them off.

Plus I would have to learn how to encode in qt, which I am doing right now. Acutally all my friends who had problems had something in common, mp4 was associated with Winamp and of course it doesn't play it at all. For me once I click on the video it will take me to a new page and QT will download it and start the playback as soon as it was finished so I everything was fine for me.

I'll let you know when the QT version is up, in the meantime if you have a couple of minutes take a look at the new wmv I just made, I only put it on the french side of my site here: www.production24fps.com/video.php

It's not as good as the h.264 one but it's not too shabby as well.


Thanks

Phil

[Glenn Chan]

Phillipe:
The web host probably has enough hard disk space. As long as you keep your total usage under 500MB you should be ok.

2- Yep, Quicktime and WMV is what I'd do. Quicktime/sorenson3 is not very good unless you pay for the professional codecs.

H.264 is excellent, but your audience will need QT7 to play it back. It's the new H.264 codec in Quicktime 7 that's good. I forget if you can encode that with Vegas... it might need Quicktime Pro.

Regardless of that, I would just must a Quicktime/sorenson3 version by outputting from Vegas. Use Qdesign Music for the audio. You might need to mess with the settings to get decent results. The quality will be worse than Windows Media unfortunately, but that's better than people seeing nothing when Windows Media doesn't work.

[Christopher Lefchik]

Philippe,

I have used Apple's MakeRefMovie utility to package Nero MPEG-4 files as a .mov file. This ensures that QuickTime will open the video and not some other media player. As a bonus, it creates a streamable video file from the Nero MPEG-4 video. (An irritation on my part with the MPEG-4 files Nero produced is that they had to download completely before playback begins. The MakeRefMovie utility solves this problem.)

The MakeRefMovie utility can be used to create a reference to other video files(s), or it can be used to package audio, images, or mpegs into a .mov file. To create a .mov file from a Nero MPEG-4 file, follow these steps.

1. Download the MakeRefMovie utility from the Apple Web site.

2. Place it in the same folder as the MPEG-4 files. This is very important. I discovered the tool would not package the MPEG-4 files into a .mov file unless the utility and the source files were in the same folder.

3. Double-click MakeRefMovie.exe to begin. When the utility opens it will prompt you for a file name for your output .mov. Give a file name and save.

4. Go to Movie>Add Movie File. Open your MPEG-4 file. You can then set various properties for the movie (minimum QuickTime version needed, though it only goes up to QT 6, etc.).

5. Save again. You should now have a streamable QuickTime .mov file from your Nero MPEG-4 movie.

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

Christopher, very cool tip! I didn't know you could do this, and this is something I use frequently. I think you just saved me some serious time.

[Glenn Chan]

Christopher, that's a great tip. Unfortunately I don't have Nero so I don't have much use for it. :/ The apple MPEG4 encoder is terrible though, I'm sure Nero stacks up well against it.

[Christopher Lefchik]

Originally Posted by Douglas Spotted Eagle

Christopher, very cool tip! I didn't know you could do this, and this is something I use frequently. I think you just saved me some serious time.

Glad it will help you! I searched high and low for a while, trying various other free utilities, before I hit upon the MakeRefMovie utility. I sure was happy to find it!

[Christopher Lefchik]

Originally Posted by Glenn Chan

The apple MPEG4 encoder is terrible though, I'm sure Nero stacks up well against it.

I agree, the Apple H.263 codec is just awful. The Nero H.263 codec just blows it away. It's probably as good as the Sorenson 3 Pro codec.

Apple's H.264 codec, though, is a whole different beast. I haven't done a serious comparison to Nero's H.264 codec, but they are at least comparable.

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

Originally Posted by Christopher Lefchik

I agree, the Apple H.263 codec is just awful. The Nero H.263 codec just blows it away. It's probably as good as the Sorenson 3 Pro codec.

Apple's H.264 codec, though, is a whole different beast. I haven't done a serious comparison to Nero's H.264 codec, but they are at least comparable.

The QT codec is a different beast, but it's not comparable (currently) to what Nero offers. IMO, Nero currently leads the field in h.264. How long they'll keep that post? I don't know. Too many h.264 irons in the fire for too many people.

[Philippe Gosselin]

Hi Chris ,


So if this is the same principle as an ASF file I should have both the ref and the original file on my ftp server then...


The thing is I successfully encode in QT through Vegas but the file is always WAY too big. When I try to encode it with h.264 Vegas crashes no matter which settings I choose. So I am left with mpeg4,sorensen etc... and these are just too big.

4 meg for a 10 second test at 256kbps/320x240 I mean come on !!!

Any tips for making it smaller

Thanks

Phil


********************EDIT***********************

Ok I think I got it, I made the ref file using the tool and posted it on my site if you guys want to test it out I would be very happy.

The only thing though Chris is that you mentionned that Nero doesn't allow for streaming you have to download the file completely before playback starts. Which settings in the Makeref program did you select to make it happen because now it needs to download completely before it starts

http://www.production24fps.com/video.php

It is the first one

Thanks

[Christopher Lefchik]

Originally Posted by Douglas Spotted Eagle

The QT codec is a different beast, but it's not comparable (currently) to what Nero offers. IMO, Nero currently leads the field in h.264.

Like I said, I hadn't done a serious comparison between the two. All I did were a few test encodes, and that's been a few months. That's interesting that Nero would lead the pack. Looks like they see the future for video is in H.264 and so are making a real effort in that area.

[Christopher Lefchik]

Originally Posted by Philippe Gosselin

So if this is the same principle as an ASF file I should have both the ref and the original file on my ftp server then...

If you use the "Movie>Add Movie File" option, AND the movie file you choose is in the same folder as the MakeRefMovie utility, the movie file will be embedded into the .mov file the MakeRefMovie program prompted you to create when you launched it. Therefore, you don't need the original movie file, as the new file is a self-contained move, not a reference movie. If you wanted to make a reference movie you would use the "Movie>Add URL" option.

Originally Posted by Philippe Gosselin

The only thing though Chris is that you mentionned that Nero doesn't allow for streaming you have to download the file completely before playback starts. Which settings in the Makeref program did you select to make it happen because now it needs to download completely before it starts

I'm not sure what you did with the file you have posted up there, but it still has the mp4 extension. If you processed an MPEG-4 file through the MakeRefMovie program you should have had a new file (in addition to the original) with a .mov extension.