Quicktime compression formats?

Daz

Urgh this is driving me crazy. So Im outputting my reel from After Effects to quicktime using the Sorensen3 compression ( under recommendation ). It seems to work pretty well and it *seems* to be much better than something like mpeg4. However, at 640x480 resolution a 2 minute movie is coming in at anything from 85 to 120 meg. What's really stumping me, is that sitting on my HD I have a couple of examples of demo reels using Sorensen3 compression that are about the same length and resolution, and yet coming in at more like 50 meg. Im using medium quality compression, pretty low sound quality. I feel that Im at the lowest I can get away with quality wise, and yet my file size seems way too big. Any experts on this stuff? And please don't tell me to use divx or something. I'd much rather fix my immediate issue. If other folks can get a decent quality 2 min 640x480.mov down to 50 meg than I wanna know how goddamit! thanks!

ScoobyDoofus

Perhaps they are using a 3rd party program to handle the compression. They output some type of lossless video format and then use a program like Cleaner *from discreet to optimise the compression & format conversion. Pretty common for authoring content like that for the web I understand.

Maybe I'll give a call to my videographer & editor friend or one of the fellas at work and see what they have to say on it.

Daz

ah OK you're right thanks Scooby. I tracked down a friend who plays with this stuff all the time and he apparently swears by 'Sorensen Squeeze'. I'll look into it.

Jeff Parrott

That is supposed to be good. I've never used Squeeze though. I have used Cleaner and got good results from that. Bink isn't bad either but it creates an exe. But not needing a codec on pc is great.

Daz

OK, So I took the uncompressed files over to my friends place to pipe them through Squeeze and I have to say that this tool is totally freaking awesome. I'm now getting fantastic quality .mov's at a 3rd of the file size they were before!

Lee3dee

yeah, Squeeze is awesome! I tried it at a friends house. compressed my demo reel to 16mb quicktime. I was very impressed!

An after Effects tip for rendering.
Hold down Shift+CTRL and goto preferences. while still holding down those buttons, click the pulldown menu, and you will see a new preference "Shecret" This enables you to render to HD every 30 frames, and use the system memory more efficiently . Its a trick I learned at Siggraph 2000 from the adobe tech guys.

Daz

ooh nice tip thanks Lee

Scott Ruggels

Ah.. working on your reel as well, at this time, eh? So why Quicktime, and not DivX encoded WMV, or some such? Also sound is a very porky resource on your reel as well.

Scott

oXYnary

Yea, the built in Sorenson Control in Quicktime isnt that optimized.. I think a full Sorenson license is like at least $1000 last time I looked??

FatAssasin

[ QUOTE ]
An after Effects tip for rendering.
Hold down Shift+CTRL and goto preferences. while still holding down those buttons, click the pulldown menu, and you will see a new preference "Shecret" This enables you to render to HD every 30 frames, and use the system memory more efficiently . Its a trick I learned at Siggraph 2000 from the adobe tech guys.

[/ QUOTE ]

Hmm, I'm not seeing this on AE 6.5 Pro. Maybe it's been removed from newer versions.

Rick Stirling

[ QUOTE ]
Ah.. working on your reel as well, at this time, eh? So why Quicktime, and not DivX encoded WMV, or some such?

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Cos QT seems to be standard and WMV is nasty to work with.