[boatrower1]

I just bought the Alchemy TV DVR card and have been recording tons of shows. However, 30 minutes turns out to take up more than 2 gigs of space. I am currently using mpeg-4 video, set to 50% and at 640 x 480. There must be a better compressor than my current one, but I have never heard of the other options. What would be the best combination of percentage/compressor?

I do not know how to post an image, so I am goign to list my options:

3ivx D4 4.5
Animation
BMP
Cinepak
Component Video
DV -PAL
DV/DCBPRO - NTSC
DVCPRO - PAL
DVCPRO50 - NTSC
DVCPRO50 - PAL
Graphics
H.261
H.263
Motion JPEG A
Motion JPEG B
MPEG-4 Video
Apple Pixlet
Planar RGB
PNG
TGA
TIFF
VC H.263
Video
JPEG 2000
Sorenson Video 3
Sorenson Video

Thanks for the help.

[buddhabelly]

This all depends on a)how your going to store it & b)how you're going to play it.

More information about these things would be helpful.

Also, you might want to search a little, as video compression comes up quite a bit here, of particular interest are pretty much any post by Uncle Skeleton.

Compression is almost an artform, IMHO, and I've had to experiment a great amount to get the results that I wanted.

[grovberg]

MPEG4 really is about as good as it gets in my opinion. Take a look at this thread where I got some great advice from UncleSkeleton about MPEG4 compressions which if used right will definitely give you the best quality/file size ratio.

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...hreadid=209748

Short version, try 3ivx (free download).
-Grover

[Axo1ot1]

The irritating thing about 3ivx is that not evryone has it, so it can be a poor choice for websites. I think it looks great, and I use it on my own site, but I am going to start using real player too because too many people have problems getting 3ivx to play.

[boatrower1]

Originally posted by buddhabelly:
This all depends on a)how your going to store it & b)how you're going to play it.

More information about these things would be helpful.

Also, you might want to search a little, as video compression comes up quite a bit here, of particular interest are pretty much any post by Uncle Skeleton.

Compression is almost an artform, IMHO, and I've had to experiment a great amount to get the results that I wanted.

My end goal would be to hopefully throw an hour show on a cd-r and burn it as a vcd so I could watch it whenever wherever (ie on a tv or computer).

Maybe the Alchemy compressor isn't as good, and I should just import at full quality and then compress it froma third party program from versiontracker?

Thanks Again

[Uncle Skeleton]

Originally posted by Axo1ot1:
The irritating thing about 3ivx is that not evryone has it, so it can be a poor choice for websites. I think it looks great, and I use it on my own site, but I am going to start using real player too because too many people have problems getting 3ivx to play.

Since version 4.5, 3ivx (the mac encoder at least) is 100% compatible with Apple's MPEG-4 codec. So if you encode with 3ivx, you get the better quality and anyone with QT6 can play it. (I believe this is true of the Windows encoder too, but you first have to change the FourCC of the output from 3IV2 to mp4v. You can do this with Metadata Hootenanny).

[Uncle Skeleton]

Originally posted by boatrower1:
My end goal would be to hopefully throw an hour show on a cd-r and burn it as a vcd so I could watch it whenever wherever (ie on a tv or computer).

The easy part is that VCD is only 352x240 (for NTSC, which is what you are), so you can have AlchemyTV scale it down before capturing and save gobs of HD space. The hard part is you have to find a decent MPEG-1 encoder that doesn't lose sound sync or anything like that. Toast has the best and easiest one in my opinion. You can find free options on versiontracker, but they tend to be a lot of work to use.

[boatrower1]

Originally posted by Uncle Skeleton:
The easy part is that VCD is only 352x240 (for NTSC, which is what you are), so you can have AlchemyTV scale it down before capturing and save gobs of HD space. The hard part is you have to find a decent MPEG-1 encoder that doesn't lose sound sync or anything like that. Toast has the best and easiest one in my opinion. You can find free options on versiontracker, but they tend to be a lot of work to use.

So do you suggest this: Import the stream at 352x240, without compression. (I love the 160 gigs on my dual 2 http://forums.macnn.com/newreply.php...ostid=1979821# ). Then use toast Titanium (I already have it) to drop the size and encode it to MPEG-1?

One problem, I have no idea how to use toast to compress video?

If I am thinking of another toast, then I will vtracker the one you suggested.

Thanks Bones

[Uncle Skeleton]

If by "without compression" you mean the "None" compressor in the QT compression options pane, I would say no. Use the card's native (as far as I can tell, but at least it's one that came with the card) compressor, the Y'CbCr thing. That's if you're insane. I would still use 3ivx, MPEG-4 or maybe MJPEG.

For Toast, just set it to the VCD window and drag your QuickTime movie over it. You'll have wait a significant amount of time, depending on your cpu speed, for it to convert to MPEG-1. And before someone asks, VCDs are restrained by the video length (about the same time as you can fit on the disc in standard audio format), and MPEG-1 video is often larger than MPEG-4. So your 350 MB MPEG-4 file still might not fit on a CD if it's more than 70 minutes long.

[buddhabelly]

Originally posted by boatrower1:
My end goal would be to hopefully throw an hour show on a cd-r and burn it as a vcd so I could watch it whenever wherever (ie on a tv or computer).

Maybe the Alchemy compressor isn't as good, and I should just import at full quality and then compress it froma third party program from versiontracker?

Thanks Again

Why not go for DVD? I thought the Dual g5s had superdrives. You would get more playback time and higher quality to boot.

[boatrower1]

Originally posted by buddhabelly:
Why not go for DVD? I thought the Dual g5s had superdrives. You would get more playback time and higher quality to boot.

Yeah, now that I think about it burning to DVD is much better. I was just thinking with my wallet and not my mind when I said cd-r. In fact, I rarely think that I will save tv shows, but probably movies. So, if I drag a movie file to the toast "dvd" window, will it make a playable dvd? I know that if I have the .vob files I need to use the "data".

Thanks for all the help again.

[buddhabelly]

Originally posted by boatrower1:
Yeah, now that I think about it burning to DVD is much better. I was just thinking with my wallet and not my mind when I said cd-r. In fact, I rarely think that I will save tv shows, but probably movies. So, if I drag a movie file to the toast "dvd" window, will it make a playable dvd? I know that if I have the .vob files I need to use the "data".

Thanks for all the help again.

I believe that with the most recent version of toast you set up the disk for dvd and drag a QT movie to it and it will convert as well as assist with setting up chapters etc, similar to making vcds.

DVD-rs are coming down in price all the time. I bought a cake of 25 around Christmas for $44. just under $2 a disc. Of those I had 2 or 3 coasters, but I think at least one of them was user error.

[boatrower1]

So I know this is off topic, but I have been searching through the forums to no avail. This was easier than making a new topic. Now that I have figured out how to get 30 minutes at 640x480 (thank you all).

My next problem is that I have a 2 hour clip that I want to cut down to 1.5 hours by just erasing the last 30 minutes (recorded too long). When I try to import it to imovie, it says it is larger than the supported file size. I have searched on vt for 'edit movie' and came up with simple video splicing. This didn't work at all.

Any suggestions?

[grovberg]

Originally posted by boatrower1:
So I know this is off topic, but I have been searching through the forums to no avail. This was easier than making a new topic. Now that I have figured out how to get 30 minutes at 640x480 (thank you all).

My next problem is that I have a 2 hour clip that I want to cut down to 1.5 hours by just erasing the last 30 minutes (recorded too long). When I try to import it to imovie, it says it is larger than the supported file size. I have searched on vt for 'edit movie' and came up with simple video splicing. This didn't work at all.

Any suggestions?

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...hreadid=210875

Look at my second post.
-grover

[boatrower1]

Originally posted by grovberg:
http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...hreadid=210875

Look at my second post.
-grover

Actually after playing around with quicktime I realized that you can delete a chunk of a movie, and then re-export the shorter version. Even though this takes oodles of time (even on my dual 2 g5) it is very easy. But don't forget to compress, or you will find yourself with a 100gig file =-0.

Thanks for all the help. I now officially close this thread.

[Uncle Skeleton]

you don't want to be re-compressing your video even a single time more than necessary. It reduces the quality each time. Also, you can just save in QTPro, you don't have to export, and it's instantaneous to boot.

[grovberg]

Originally posted by boatrower1:
Actually after playing around with quicktime I realized that you can delete a chunk of a movie, and then re-export the shorter version. Even though this takes oodles of time (even on my dual 2 g5) it is very easy. But don't forget to compress, or you will find yourself with a 100gig file =-0.

Thanks for all the help. I now officially close this thread.

Just to clarify, my post in the other thread is to an Applescript that wil do this automatically.
-grover

[Talk2Angus]

This all depends on a)how your going to store it & b)how you're going to play it.

More information about these things would be helpful.

Also, you might want to search a little, as video compression comes up quite a bit here, of particular interest are pretty much any post by Uncle Skeleton.

Compression is almost an artform, IMHO, and I've had to experiment a great amount to get the results that I wanted.

[Mark E]

Originally posted by buddhabelly:
This all depends on a)how your going to store it & b)how you're going to play it.

More information about these things would be helpful.

Also, you might want to search a little, as video compression comes up quite a bit here, of particular interest are pretty much any post by Uncle Skeleton.

Compression is almost an artform, IMHO, and I've had to experiment a great amount to get the results that I wanted.

Originally posted by Talk2Angus:
This all depends on a)how your going to store it & b)how you're going to play it.

More information about these things would be helpful.

Also, you might want to search a little, as video compression comes up quite a bit here, of particular interest are pretty much any post by Uncle Skeleton.

Compression is almost an artform, IMHO, and I've had to experiment a great amount to get the results that I wanted.

talk2angus, do you ever actually post a relevant, helpful reply to any topic, or do you just copy and paste exactly what other people have written before you?

[Uncle Skeleton]

sometimes only the meaning is copy/pasted

http://forums.macnn.com/showthread.p...hreadid=214830