[pkjackson]

Just got my ZR20, and have been trying to save a few short (10-30 minutes) videos in a format that is less then 650mb so that it will fit on a CD.
I would like to be able to play back these clips full screen on my iBook (dual USB 500). My example video is 30 minutes of 720x480 at 30 frames/sec. What is the best compression settings (exporting from iMovie, or QT Pro) for this purpose?

From Quicktime Pro use Sorenson 3. If you can afford it buy Toast Titaniumn (approx $50) and export to mpeg 1 from Quicktime. You'll also able to format a VCD to use on some DVD players.

a codec calculator is handy http://raytraced.cjb.net/

[Cipher13]

I find Media Cleaner invaluable for all my encoding needs... it rocks, majorly.

[- - e r i k - -]

Scale your video down to 50% and then play it back at 200%. This is the single most space-saving trick... Oh, and you can safely do with just 24 fps too.

Sorenson 3 seems to yield the best performance / quality / size so far. You might also try experimenting with 3ivx.

[pkjackson]

OK....I tried compressing some video with Sorenson 3 without much luck.
I compressed 720x480 with a data rate of 500k/sec
When I play the video back in QuickTime, it is very "jumpy"...I only get frame rate of 10-12/sec at best...usually slower......what gives here?
I have tried playing these clips on both my G4/400 and my iBook/500 with about the same results....very jumpy video because of the slow frame rates.

First question: Is is possible to play back full frame video (720x480) at 24-30 frames/sec on a G4/400 or an iBook/500?

Second question: What would be the best settings to get this to happen?

You've probably set the datarate too high, try 200-250k/s and you'll probably get better results. Also, set size to 640x430 or so. Play around with datarates and sizes a bit (Sor3 scales up pretty nicely) and you'll probably get good results.

[Chuck_star]

Hey pkjacson

Your in luck. I've tried everything. Here are my shining stars.

suggestion: Get quicktime pro(if you don't already have it).


1)Open file in Quicktime. Export to toast VCD self contained(settings should all be preset). Open the resulting file through your QT player. Save to make it default to quicktime.

**4.1gigs to 190 mb.** @ 173 kb/sec
(original 4.1 gig file 19 min DV NTSC)


2) Save as a QT movie self contained.

Video: Sorenson 2 (indigenous QT codec)
Quality setting to 95 (643mb)
Quality setting to 100 (743mb)
360x240(half of the orginal)

Audio: IMA 4:1 16 bit 44.1kHz mono

**4.1gigs to 643mb**@ 583 kb/sec

Both play and look great at full screen. Sorenson looks a bit better but is much bigger in size.
G4MP450 512ram

[jac]

I beg to differ, Sorenson 3 is waaaaaay better than sor 2. Just make sure you've got the latest QT (5.0.2).

[- - e r i k - -]

OK. First try at compressing with Sorenson 3.
http://homepage.mac.com/wigwammultim.../dreamgirl.mov

320x240 px
Sorenson 3 at medium quality
Qdesign 2 music codec at 44.100, too bad that codec sucks though.. I have to recompress it with that IMA codec and see what happens.

2,8 megs for 14 seconds. Hmmm... isn't taht a bit too high? Must be the damn sound...

I have had pretty good results using the On2VP3 codec with 320x240 resolution. I use the default settings for auto keyframes but with the target datarate set to 60KBytes/sec. That will usually work out to about 3.6 megs/min of video. Audio is the big problem as the QDesign2 (free) encoder does a lousy job on speech and the Qualcom Purevoice sucks on music and only does mono sound. I generally use the IMA4:1 compressor with sampling downsampled to 22.050khz. It sounds decent and isn't too large a audio track with a datarate of about 23kbytes/sec. Overall you are then looking at about 5megs/min for the two tracks.
The VP3 codec is available at: http://www.vp3.com