Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

Rolling Musubi · Jul 18, 2002, 06:30 AM

Has anyone managed to get really good results like the ones in their video gallery? I haven't gotten anywhere near that unless I use really high bit rates. I've a <a href="http://homepage.mac.com/rolling_musubi/mp4-test/" target="_blank">page</a> with more info and examples.

lucylawless · Jul 18, 2002, 03:14 PM

It looks like you might have a 1-pixel border around your image. I don't know if it's from your encodes, your png's, or my browser. I know that cripples 3ivx's encoding efficiency, but I don't know about other mpeg4 codecs. Also, did you try with and without mild blur or noise reduction?

I'm the first one to suspect that Apple uses options not available to us for their movies, but I'm also the first one to take advantage of someone else to do the tests for me

OwlBoy · Jul 19, 2002, 10:42 PM

here is a sample video I did... I got great results I have to say...

<a href="http://www.palacenet.net/home/bortz/minority_report_mpeg4.mov" target="_blank">http://www.palacenet.net/home/bortz/minority_report_mpeg4.mov</a>

Source is MPEG2 off of a DVD. Encoded with cleaner. To make it encode a bit better I used that option that convers colors close to black to black so that all the times the screen was black / mostly black you would not see the compression arifacts from it trying to comprss grainyness fro mthe film...

Anyone else have any samples they have made?

-Owl

Forgive my spelling.

Rolling Musubi · Jul 20, 2002, 04:29 AM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by lucylawless:
It looks like you might have a 1-pixel border around your image. I don't know if it's from your encodes, your png's, or my browser. I know that cripples 3ivx's encoding efficiency, but I don't know about other mpeg4 codecs. Also, did you try with and without mild blur or noise reduction?

I'm the first one to suspect that Apple uses options not available to us for their movies, but I'm also the first one to take advantage of someone else to do the tests for me

<hr /></blockquote>Thanks! Might be the pngs. My source was pretty much pristine DV. I also did experiment with mild noise reduction, blur (quality was worse with no noise reduction and helped a little with blur). I also converted the DV to MPEG-2 and then ran that through ffmpeg to DivX5 at 400kbits/sec and got excellent results. So more so I think that we're not seeing all the options and Player is just giving some basic presets.

P.S. If I crank up the data rate significantly, it looks really good but then it defeats my goal of using a lower rate to get about the same level quality as Sorenson 3.

[ 07-20-2002, 06:09 AM: Message edited by: Rolling Musubi ]

Rolling Musubi · Jul 20, 2002, 05:04 AM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by OwlBoy:
here is a sample video I did... I got great results I have to say...
<hr /></blockquote>That looks really great! If I use a data rate of at least 750kbits/sec on the video, I get results that match my Sorenson 3 one (but naturally, the MP4 file also ends up larger). Using 900kbits/sec and up, I get really excellent results like yours.

OwlBoy · Jul 20, 2002, 09:07 AM

<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by Rolling Musubi:
 <blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by OwlBoy:
here is a sample video I did... I got great results I have to say...
<hr /></blockquote>That looks really great! If I use a data rate of at least 750kbits/sec on the video, I get results that match my Sorenson 3 one (but naturally, the MP4 file also ends up larger). Using 900kbits/sec and up, I get really excellent results like yours.<hr /></blockquote>Yeah I guess mine is not ment to stream, but to be more of a progrssive download like the largest trailers on Apples site

.

-Owl

pdot · Jul 21, 2002, 10:26 AM

I get decent quality, though not as good as some DivX files I've seen (How do they do that with only 40-80KB/s?!). My biggest problem is the playback framerate. I wonder would both the new Radeon 9000 graphics card and 10.2 help?

OwlBoy · Jul 22, 2002, 11:47 AM

I also wanted to note that here is the Sorenson 3 version of the minority report teaser I encoded...

<a href="http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/minority_report/trail1_lg.html" target="_blank">http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/minority_report/trail1_lg.html</a>

<blockquote>code:<hr /><pre style="font-size:x-small; font-family: monospace;">Sorenson3: 480x272 : 11.4 MB : 140 k bytes/sec : about 24 fps
MPEG4 : 640x353 : 9.6 MB : 120.6 K bytes/sec : about 24 fps</pre><hr /></blockquote>-Owl

[ 07-22-2002, 12:48 PM: Message edited by: OwlBoy ]

Rolling Musubi · Jul 25, 2002, 06:18 PM

I did more playing around using only Cleaner 5 (in OS X) this time. One tip is to create a new setting and not reuse an old one and redo the options since that caused one of my problems with "funky" settings that probably was confusing Cleaner previously while encoding.

Cleaner 5 advanced settings: In the output tab, select MPEG-4. Check options and click the set button. This brings up the same MPEG-4 settings dialog where you can set your parameters. I used a data rate of 300 kbits/sec for the video and 64 kbits/sec for my audio. In the image tab, parameters need to be set depending on source (in my case, I used auto/adaptive deinterlacing and mild adaptive noise reduce). In the encode tab, select Apple MPEG4 Compressor. I left the spatial quality slider at the default 50 (I did play with values between 52-60 and got nicer to supreme quality video at the expense of an increase in file size). There is a temporal quality slider but that cannot be changed. Keyframes and video data rate I left unchecked since it pulls it from the earlier setting in the output tab. In the audio tab, select MPEG-4 Audio and make necessary setting changes as needed. Tip, depending on what was set earlier in the audio portion of the MPEG-4 settings, you may need to adjust the sample rate. For the 64k/sec that I used, I needed to change the 32kHz to 44kHz else the encode would bomb out (Cleaner 5 seems to have a few small interaction quirks like this with the new CODEC).

I then encoded my DV source again and got equal or slightly better results at a lower total data rate compared to Sorenson 3 and significantly better results compared to the prior MP4 output. Cleaner as usual does a much better job at analyzing the video and though it takes a much longer time to do its work, the results are well worth it.

Here is a <a href="http://homepage.mac.com/rolling_musubi/mp4-test/test-mpeg4.mp4" target="_blank">sample</a> (ctrl-click to save) of the MP4 clip.

[ 07-25-2002, 07:26 PM: Message edited by: Rolling Musubi ]

OwlBoy · Jul 25, 2002, 10:49 PM

That looks much better

. Cleaner 6 will be more integrated with MPEG4 I guess... but stil have to fork over the $$$ for it

EDIT: BTW, can I ask who that is? She is cute

-Owl

[ 07-25-2002, 11:56 PM: Message edited by: OwlBoy ]