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Question About A Codec


Lukich

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Hello. I have a question for you, guys. I'm trying to put my demo reel online as a quicktime movie. It's about 3 minutes long, and when I compressed it with Animation codec low quality, it came up to about 220 Mb.

This is too much for a web page, takes a very long time to load up. I was wondering, if there are any tricks that you guys know, (besides making my demo reel shorter), that can condense the file further.

Thank you very much,

Luka

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I'm only compressing it with a codec. I tried Sorenson 3 low res and got 63 Mb instead of 220. Much better :) I'm uploading it right now to check if 60 M is small enough or not. It'll be too bad if I have to compress it again.

thanks Arctur

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hey lukich,

the animation codec should only be used for archival purposes as it is a lossless compression algorithm.. so basically it's good for keeping videos that you want backed up as a master but don't want it take up all the disk space as uncompressed video would..

as far as the web.. how long is this video and at was res? 63 megs still seems way too high for my tastes (you are cutting your chances of people viewing it if it takes them too long to download).. figure 10 megs per minute at absolute tops.. given that, you shouldn't exceed 30 megs total as your reel probably shouldn't be longer than 3 min. also remember, your reel online doesn't have to be 800x600 res or anything.. mine runs at 400x300, is 2:15 min, 15 megs, and is crystal clear (as well as outdated if you wanna throw that out there :rolleyes: )

as far as codecs, i agree with arctor, sorenson 3 would be your best choice for quicktime but i sometimes like to offer an alternative like divx in case there's someone out there that refuses qt. as far as cleaner, i'm not a big fan.. i think discreet just killed it once they got a hold of it.. i enjoy sorenson squeeze but that's just me.. it has some limitations that bug me, but it gets better each version and is still better than most out there.. plus it includes the sorenson 3 pro codec which is night and day difference from the standard one.. it can handle multi-pass vbr as well as full control over what you're outputing. it's perfect for web output and looks beautiful but also comes with a price tag.

just as a general reference for things to adjust to help you reduce file size:

Video Resolution

Video Length

Frame rate

Video *and* Audio Codec Compression (and settings if available i.e bitrate, quality, etc)

plus possibly some other things i'm forgetting about.. :)

hth,

dave

p.s. another thing to note.. *never* compress your compressed video.. always have a master (animation, uncompressed, or frame sequences) and compress from there.

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actually, the Cleaner export to web option for wmv is pretty nice. i rendered out a quicktime optimized for web, and it was awful, couldn't see anything. wmv's quality's about 10 times higher with the same size (about 5MB). now the problem is that windows media player sucks, you can't scrub it. so i'm rerendering it into a quicktime. hopefully it'll look the same :)

thanks a lot for your responses, guys!

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i remember reading some time ago a comparison of codecs (cant find the link though).. some are better at different features than others, e.g. fast motion, high contrast etc. i think the consensus was that quicktime is the best all round.

viva la mplayer!

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