[Demonhood]

Quicktime 5.0.2 just came out. It now contains the Sorenson 3 codec that was previously present in QT 5 betas. I haven't messed around too much with it (just one little encoding test), but it seems rather nice.

Any feedback/questions/issues with this codec?

Once the MacNN Film Competition gets started I'll probably encode using this codec.

[IMKoRnNuts]

Here's my little analysis:

I took a little movie I had, and compressed it with Sorenson 2 and with the new Sorenson 3.

These were the settings used:
• 256 x 192
• 30.5 KB/sec.
• 15 fps.

Both movies were 1 min. 5 sec. long. This is how they came out:

Sorenson 2:
• Encoding time: 6 min. 4 sec.
• File size: 1.8 MB

Sorenson 3
• Encoding time: 6 min. 11 sec.
• File size: 1.9 MB

The Sorenson 3 version is of slightly better quality, but nothing noticable unless you really look for it.

Encoding took place on a DP G4 533 with 640 MB RAM using Media Cleaner EZ 4.

Overall I'm happy but I'm not...

I had very different results. Using a raw 1 minute clip 352X240, I compressed using Sorenson 2, and Sorenson 3, and the results:


Sorenson 2:

Encoding: 8 minutes 42 seconds
File size: 2.9 megs


Sorenson 3:

Encoding: 3 minutes 34 seconds
File Size: 1.8 megs.


I saw dramatic speed boosts when encoding with Sorenson 3 when taking my raw uncompressed QT webcam videos and other uncompressed QT videos, quality is as good, if not slightly better than Sorenson 2

-R

[Demonhood]

i'll do a more extensive test later, but with the very very short clip i encoded, the Sor 3 version was slightly larger, but also much closer to the original clip in color/contrast/etc.. than the Sor 2 version.

hmm.

[IMKoRnNuts]

What did you guys use to encode them? Just QT Pro? Cus I used Media Cleaner EZ 4... and I don't think that's really supposed to work with QT 5...

[Cipher13]

Am I the only one that majorly dislikes Sorenson? Too many artifacts...
MPEG1 rules... hehe.

[berlin chris]

at the same datarate i got double framerate and better quality when useing sorenson 2 pro and sorenson 3 basic. i love it

[shortcipher]

I did some tests and this is what I found out:

Sorenson 3 is much better on colour purity, difficult colours like reds and oranges are way way better than with SO2. Fine detail shows up much better as a result (try thin red type on a black background and you'll see what I mean)

SO3 does much better with equivalent data rates, a movie at 70k using SO3 looks much better than a movie at 70k using SO2.

SO3 has seems to have a higher data rate 'ceiling'. With SO2, pushing the data rate up above 175K (with a 384x288@25fps clip) does nothing, the data rate is clipped back, but with SO3 the data rate will go as high as 240k before it is clipped, this means better quality.

SO3 encodes much faster, no it really does, loads faster.

there you have it.

All clips were rendered using a 768x576@25fps original which wasn't compressed at all (Animation). Output clips were half size 384x288@25fps, rendered using Quicktime Player on Mac OSX 10.0.4 on a G4 450.