[jeronimo]

hey guys

I have to export a video that will be part of a multimedia CD for a band.
I tried a few codecs on FCP 3 but the only one that made me happy w/ the quality and the size of the file was mpeg-4, but, it plays kinda slugish on the band's producer computer, so... it's not "authorized" to go out like this...
can you guys recomenend some settings that I could try to see if it plays better in slower PCs?

[scottiB]

Will this be played off the CD or are users to copy the file to the hard drive? If CD, you're perhaps limited to drive speed more than CPU age.

[jeronimo]

Ok... so let's say I'll limit by the drive speed... how should I do this?

[scottiB]

I took this QT of mine:

• 1:01 length QuickTime movie, Animation codec
• 720x480, Millions of colors, 29.97 fps
• Audio: Uncompressed, 44.1khz, 16-bit
• File size: 1051 MB (throughput 17.2 MB/sec data rate)
• Content: motion graphics piece created in AE, not constant video (if that's important)

...and ran it through Cleaner 6 using the presets QuickTime>NTSC>CD&DVD High and CD&DVD Low. While the presets aren't wonderful, they can give you starting-point settings with which to mess around (All these settings are available w/ QT Pro and FCP). I burned the files to CD and played them back on an DP 800 and an iMac 266's internal CD drives.

CD&DVD High settings:

• Sorenson Video 3
• 480x360, Millions of Colors
• 30 fps
• Audio - IMA 4:1, Stereo, 44.1 kHz, 16 bit

This resulted in a file size of 9.9 MB and a throughput of 168 kilobytes per second. It played smoothly on my DP 800 with 24x read SuperDrive (QT 6), but the fps dropped to 1-2 fps on an iMac 266/24x read CD-ROM (QT 5).

CD&DVD Low settings:

• Sorenson Video 3
• 320x240, Millions of Colors
• 15 fps
• Audio - QDesign Music 2, Stereo, 44.1 kHz, 16 bit

This resulted in a file size of 4.1 MB and a throughput of 70.3 kilobytes per second. It played smoothly on an iMac 266/24x read CD-ROM (QT 5).

You might consider offering small (70 KB/sec), medium (90-100 KB/s), and large (150-200 KB/s) files on the CD--depending on movie length, of course.

[Powaqqatsi]

What a coincidence I wanted to ask the same thing. What's the best setting to encode about 10GB of DV to a 650MB file (20-22 minute movie) ? (it has to fit on a CD-ROM, DVD is not an option), it's not really limited to the cd-drive speed, I have Cleaner 6.

[scottiB]

Originally posted by Powaqqatsi:
What a coincidence I wanted to ask the same thing. What's the best setting to encode about 10GB of DV to a 650MB file (20-22 minute movie) ? (it has to fit on a CD-ROM, DVD is not an option), it's not really limited to the cd-drive speed, I have Cleaner 6.

Let me preface this and postscript my above posts by saying I'm not a professional compressionist by any means. I'm just a hobbyist. Compression, though, I find interesting, and I've been reading Ben Waggoner's Compression for Great Digital Video. There are others around this board that are pros at this sort of thing, I'm sure.

Anyway, Powaqqatsi, from your post, it seems that the CD is a delivery method, and the end-user will copy this (I presume QT .mov file) to his or her hard drive. A 22 minute .mov that's 650 MB will need a computer that can handle roughly 500 kilobytes (or 4 megabits--500 KB * 8 bits) per second throughput: 650 MB / 1320 seconds (22 min * 60 seconds). Most any laptop or desktop from an iBook 366 and iMac 266 newer (or any PIII 500 up) should be able to handle that, I would think (DV capture to iMovie needs a transfer rate of 3.6 MB/second, IIRC).

If you know that he or she has QT 6, I'd use Cleaner's MPEG4 presets as a baseline and adjust from there. If you can, cut and paste some shorter snippets where there's a lot of movement, brightness changes, cross-dissolves, etc. into 3-5 minute .movs to run tests. If you're unsure of the QT version, use Sorenson 3 (I've not dealt with audio, really, yet.)

Something I learned is not to be rigid in maintaining full NTSC resolution for QT. Sometimes I needed to downscale the size to maintain fps or image quality. In compressing, there are trade-offs, to say the obvious.

Hope this helps... .

[Powaqqatsi]

Yes Thanks a lot ScottiB. I'll go for MPEG4. But what if there are more people who need to see this movie, and what if they have PC's (and don't want to install QT)? Should I compress in MPEG-1, or are there any onther (read: better) codecs that are fully compatible with the average PC ? I hope I won't be needing this anyway.

[Uncle Skeleton]

3ivx is fully compatible with a lot more PCs than QT6, and it's faster than any other mpeg-4 codec, and it no longer requires any QT installation on Windows. The compression quality is good too