Video encoding option madness
Today I’ve spent the better part of the day encoding video. Not by hand, iMovie does all of the dirty work for me. Though I’m surprised at how many choices there are with video formats, sizes, resolutions, frame rate, audio quality, compression method, etc.
I’m all for choice but is this the only area of iMovie that Apple hasn’t made dummy-proof? Apple does offer some default “sharing” options for you to choose from. You can choose to send someone a video via email, on a CD-ROM, or streaming over the web with almost any bandwidth selection but once you get to that point there is a huge jump in size to anything with good quality.
Let me explain. Say I don’t want to export my movie at “Full Quality”, which at present would leave me with a 1.51GB video, but the “Broadband-High” nor the “CD-ROM” qualities produce good results. What should I do? I can hop into the expert settings and, even though I know less than diddily about video encoding, I can start clicking on various options until I think I have what I want (though I can’t accurately preview the result nor see any statistics regarding file size) and then I can wait an hour for it to encode only to find out that I am not happy with the result. Grrr.
There seems to be this huge gap between video that is “ok” to watch online and video that is “ok” to watch offline. Being that broadband has come a long way, and video sharing sites like Viddler are giving users the ability to upload much higher quality video than before, I think it is time to add a few more “dummy” options into the mix. Perhaps the “Broadband-High” could get a bump in quality or a new selection could be created altogether. I think it is time we start seeing higher quality video in public, rather than the crap we’re usually served.
Either way, I’m finding it very difficult to strike a balance between the overall size of my video file and its quality. Any suggestions?
[tags]imovie, apple, video, viddler, ilife, encoding[/tags]
[slug]video-encoding-options[/slug]
January 22nd, 2007 at 7:41 pm
I think the previous versions of iMovie had different levels of broadband but I’m not sure.
Now, I’m not sure who your intended audience is or how big of a file you’re looking for, but for me I can pretty much assume that whoever I send a link to has VLC and can play DIVX encoded files. So that’s my first instinct is to use the DiVX option and encode that way. I’m testing this right now, but I’m on a powerbook so my cpu is a little slow on this stuff.
I’ll report back with more info and a screen shot to compare quality.
January 22nd, 2007 at 11:52 pm
Hey CD! Sorry you’re experiencing frustration. Let’s get this working for you:
1) What’s your intended delivery medium? This site? Uploading to a video service like Blip.tv, Veoh, Revver, YouTube, etc?
2) How long are your clips? That will give us a target file size.
3) Subject matter? Lots of movement and action or more talking head type stuff?
4) How’s the light? Lower light will encode as crap versus what you can get by with if you have a very well lit subject and background.
5) Finish size? 640×480? 320×240? Or are you doing wide screen stuff?
6) Assume you’re not doing HD but want to make sure.
Lastly, for your own sanity and to save time, trim a clip of the worst lit or fastest moving part of the project. Export as a DV (full quality) just that clip. I like to do 1 minute clips so I can estimate the finished MB/minute file size. But you could do 15 seconds and extrapolate. Then experiment with your clip.
LMK on the above and I’ll send some QT export settings to get you headed in the right direction.
Aloha my friend.
January 23rd, 2007 at 1:57 am
sorry to hear about your frustrations with iMovie. i have used it before for video editing both for personal and nonpersonal reasons but i am still at best a novice so i can offer you no support but in the form of empathy for your frustrations with it. good luck!
January 23rd, 2007 at 7:54 am
Secret Camerman: Thanks for offering to help. Here are the answers to your questions, in-line:
1) What’s your intended delivery medium? This site? Uploading to a video service like Blip.tv, Veoh, Revver, YouTube, etc?
Yes. And it will be going up on Viddler. Obviously I can save it as full DV and put it on a DVD as a “keepsake”. But for distribution and streaming it will be hosted with Viddler. (btw, this particular video will be a 6-part series that I did for Viddler)
2) How long are your clips? That will give us a target file size.
The first in the series is 7minutes and 30seconds after I’ve edited it. I am guessing that the next five parts will be about half that length.
3) Subject matter? Lots of movement and action or more talking head type stuff?
This first part is all outside while we are walking. Very Beach Walks like, though without the beach I’m afraid.
4) How’s the light? Lower light will encode as crap versus what you can get by with if you have a very well lit subject and background.
It was decent light. It is winter here so the light is soft but that actually makes for decent video.
5) Finish size? 640×480? 320×240? Or are you doing wide screen stuff?
I’d like it to be larger than 320 if at all possible. Not widescreen, I have an old-school DV.
6) Assume you’re not doing HD but want to make sure.
Read #5’s answer.
I hope this will help. After encoding quite a bit I’m starting to get fairly good results. Though no flash encoder that I’ve tried (Viddler’s included), likes .MOV files. I am being told to give AVI at at least 500kbps a try, but I haven’t yet.
January 24th, 2007 at 12:16 am
Thanks for the info. I have to work on today’s Beach Walks but will get back to you later tonight with some example settings we use based on your answers above.
In the mean time, have you played with VisualHub? It’s basically a GUI to ffmpeg and is pretty awesome. Not a lot of fine grain control like what you get with ffmpegX. But you can turn out pretty decent .SWF and .FLV files. Drop a .DV on it and see what you get. We used to use it to do all our encoding but were getting skips with the WMVs and have gone back to strickly QT Pro. But I do still use VisualHub to stitch files together, batch a bunch at a time, and use the MPEG with the Tivo profile to make Tivo friendly clips that I can send to any of our Tivo boxes so we can show stuff to friends on the TV instead of having to gather around the monitor.
January 25th, 2007 at 8:38 pm
I was hoping to do a quick screencast on this (and still plan to in the future) but am completely out of time for this week. So, in the mean time, here are the settings I would use for what you describe above.
1) Open the .DV in QuickTime Pro.
2) Choose Export from the File menu.
3) From the Export: dropdown, choose “Movie to Quicktime Movie” and then click the Options button
4) Make sure Video, Sound and Prepare for Internet Streaming are all checked and Internet Streaming should be set to Fast Start.
5) Back up in the Video area, Click on Settings…
Compression Type = H.264
Frame Rate = 24 fps
Key Frames = Every 24 frames
Frame Reordering = checked
Quality = High
Encoding = Best Quality (Multi-pass)
Date Rate = Restrict to 768 kbits/sec
Optimized for = Download
Click OK
6) Still in video area, click Size…
Choose a size or select Custom and enter a 4×3 ration. We use 480×360 for Beach Walks
Interlace Source Video = checked (VERY IMPORTANT!!!)
Click OK
7) In the Sound box, click Settings…
Format = AAC
Channels = Mono (unless stereo is important and you recorded with more than one mic
Rate = 44.1 (very important so your audio doesn’t sound like chipmunks on some video sharing sites)
Quality = Best
Bit Rate Format: Variable
Target Bit Rate: 64 (don’t need it higher for non HD video)
Precedence = Bit Rate
Click OK
That will result in very decent quality video that will play if transferred to a CD, stream wonderfully over the Web, and should encode well on video sharing sites if they have decent FLV conversion for Flash encoding.
At a format size of 480×360 this will end up being about 6MB per minute of video. We’ve tried lower Data Rates but start getting artifacts below the 768 kbits/sec.
I’d love to hear specific settings that others have found successful. Especially at the larger format sizes.
January 25th, 2007 at 8:41 pm
PS: You could also experiment with lower Frame Rates to really reduce the size of the final file. We use 24 because it’s passable for the stuff we do at Beach Walks. 30 is too high with little appreciable difference. Some people drop to 15 or even 12 FPS for internet video but that’s too choppy for our purposes.
Your “Rocky” video could probably get away with 12-15 FPS because of the slow motion effects you used and it might even enhance the effect. It all depends on what Viddler is doing with your clip once you upload it.
January 26th, 2007 at 12:10 pm
Secret Cameraman: Thanks so much for all of this input. Later today I’ll give a few videos a try and let you know the outcome.
Again, I really appreciate you taking the time to write all of this up for me.
January 26th, 2007 at 5:36 pm
Quick update: Secret Cameraman your feedback was great. The video came out very very good! More on this in a little while.