Compressing QT movie

[kinnylandrum]

I have a question for anyone on this forum who has any experience with this. I have written some music for the beginning of a documentary, which I have mixed with dialogue and successfully laid back to a QuickTime Movie. This movie was extracted by using DVDxDV Pro into 7 1/2 minute 1.69 gig DV QT movies from a DVD of the film sent to me. I scored the first 3 1/2 minutes and will be sending it back both as an audio file and with the mix I made laid on to the QT movie. The problem is that it's really too big. I need to compress it, probably using QT Pro, but I want the best quality sound and I want the 720x360 (is that right?) size. This 3 1/2 minute chunk is 785 megs as is, too big for even a CD-R. Although of course I could make a DVD, this is time consuming and the disks are far more expensive. I know I'll have to do this a lot with demos. What is the most time efficient and cost effective way of doing this? Heck, if I could get decent sounding and looking files that were under 10 megs I could e-mail them. Any advice anyone has on this would be appreciated, since I have no real experience with video. Thank you,
Kinny Landrum

[musicarteca]

I am not sure about QT pro, but with iMovie you have the choice to compress the video to the resolution that you want while keeping the audio at full quality.

[kinnylandrum]

Thanks Alex for your reply (BTW, your tutorial on Beat Detection was great, helped me a lot, thanks). I've tried both CinePak and Sorenstan (sp?) and although they reduced the size (from 1/3 to more than 1/10 the size), I found their video quality a little less than stellar. I tried iMovie as you suggest, but I found the fact that you had to import the QT file first (which said it would take 8 minutes) to be too time consuming. I think I'll try mp4 now. Any first hand knowledge and experience would be greatly appreciated.
Kinny Landrum

[Morpheo]

Originally posted by Kinny Landrum:
Thanks Alex for your reply (BTW, your tutorial on Beat Detection was great, helped me a lot, thanks). I've tried both CinePak and Sorenstan (sp?) and although they reduced the size (from 1/3 to more than 1/10 the size), I found their video quality a little less than stellar. I tried iMovie as you suggest, but I found the fact that you had to import the QT file first (which said it would take 8 minutes) to be too time consuming. I think I'll try mp4 now. Any first hand knowledge and experience would be greatly appreciated.
Kinny Landrum

it's sorenson

and keep in mind that 720x480 won't allow you to have a very small file. You could try 480x360...
What would be your maximum file size (including audio) ?

Try MJPEG instead, medium quality should do it. IIRC you also have the option to leave the audio uncompressed but I'm not 100% sure. Don't bother with iMovie, since it uses quicktime for encoding/converting anyway.

[kinnylandrum]

Morpheo,
I guess I got Annika Sorenstam on the brain. Anyway, I'm not sure what my target size is (boy, is that a double entendre or what!). When you say MJPEG do you mean Motion JPEG and if so, do you mean A or B? The only reason I wanted 720x480 is to impress the client. Right now I only want my 785 meg file redueced enough to fit on a CD with no obvious loss, but I'm open to whatever works and is both time and cost effective. I'll try whatever you say to try.
Thanks,
KInny

[kinnylandrum]

Morpheo,
I tried Motion JPEG B at medium quality and it did the job very well, reducing 785 to 480 megs so I can send one CD with the QT Movie as well as both 44.1 and 48 meg audio files ( don't know which they need). Thanks so much. At some point I'll have to see if it's feasible to send smaller files via e-mail, but that's after I get the job Thanks again,
Kinny Landrum

[Hiddenstory]

GO TO: http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/fcp_homepage_index.html

Then scroll down to "WHITE PAPERS" and check out
the QTime entry. This will answer questions on internet
delivery/compression/file size etc.

[kinnylandrum]

Great article. Answers lots of questions. Thanks,

[Gerk]

H.264 or mpeg4 would be the choice for me. QT Pro 7 will do all of the above.

The nice thing about the mpeg4 variants (including H.264) is that you get good control of bitrates and they are separated from the audio components .. so you could set a fairly low bitrate on the video (I mean they know what it looks like already) but keep the audio quietly much higher. To get things smaller you can keep bumping down the bitrates until you get it small enough/good enough. I don't think you'll get that much control with most of the other QT codecs...

Mark

P.S. I assembled a 43 Gig , 5 minute quicktime file today, completely uncompressed, and it had a bitrate of a little over 1.2 million kbps (!!!!!) Of course you can't play anything at that rate, but wow, them's is big numbers!

[Hiddenstory]

hey Gerk,
You are right about H.264. But unless the people who you are sending movies have that codec they can't open file.
I'm telling all my clients to download free QT 7 for mac and
windows.H.264 is very new.
To play it safe I usually compress with Sorenson 3.
15 fps, 24 key frames, compressor quality medium
( unless file is small than high) for audio I import
aiff into QT and choose ACC as audio compression.
ACC is awesome. I can get a 30sec. 83 meg movie
down to 1.8 megs and it looks pretty dam good.

[Hiddenstory]

Also you can go to flip4mac.com and download
an app. that lets you export to Windows Media right out of
the QT export menu. You can also open Windows Media
right in the QT player. That one drove me nuts.
I hate all the options but then again I love them
more than I hate them.

[BKK-OZ]

The H. 264 codec is amazing, so I'm planning on using that from now on.

If people don't have QT 7, it will take them a few minutes to download and install it, and its worth it.

-tho be warned, if you are using QT Pro, installing QT 7 player over-writes your Pro version and you have to pay for the upgrade to QT 7 Pro.

[spinnaker]

Try Sorenson Squeeze.. This will give the results you want with a small file size.

http://www.sorensonstore.com/product_info.php?url=http://www.sorensonstore.com/products/sq4mpeg4win.html

jon

[Hiddenstory]

OH crap! More stuff I need. Now Sorenson Sqeeze will
be haunting me until I get it. Techno-Lust... the madness
of the 21st century musician. The only cure is more.
But I love it.

Thanks for the tip jon

[Keith Henry]

Kinny,

If you are only the audio person on this project, why are you concerning yourself with the movie compressions? You shouldn't have to send a QT back to the video editors. The video editors should have sent you a very compressed QT movie from their video timeline 1:00:00:00 to whatever 1:??:??:??-assuming they're using Final Cut Pro, Premiere, or whatever. You would then import their compressed QT movie into DP, making sure your frames and sample rates (48K for video) are the same as their session. Then you'd send them back your audio (stero or 5.1) for them to import back into their video session. As long as nobody (video or audio) has moved their material in the timelines, your audio should lineup precisely where it should be in their video editor, and boom they now export their Hi res video with audio for DVD.

Cheers

<small>[ June 19, 2005, 02:08 PM: Message edited by: julio ugliass ]</small>