Delivery Help!

Hello all,

I have a real quandary...I have worked super hard on an industrial shot at 1080p and the clients, and their IT guy are insisting that I deliver onto a USB flash drive so that it will play on an average PC laptop with the assumption that the laptop has a windows only media player.

I have been exporting via quicktime conversion rendering all day to a custom .avi of 5000 KBytes/sec with the native dimensions and frame rate. My first render took about 4 hours and got corrupted somehow as it had really pronounced artifacting etc.

It just looks hideous...and it is bumming me out. I have not tried increasing the KBytes/sec because it takes forever to render...the clients are not complaining but it is a profound irritant to my integrity.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you very much.

-John

i cant offer much help on the windows front, others will be able to.

but dont use QuickTime conversion from FCP.
export as a QuickTime movie, same settings,
self contained is best.

you then use that file in whatever conversion app is best for the job:
Compressor (possibly with some 3rd party plugins from Flip4Mac)
or other.

obviously do tests on a smaller segment, not the whole show.


cheers,
nick

As far as I know, Windows Media Player has been able to play MPEG-4s in H.264 codec for a while now. Do you know for a fact that this one can't?


www.derekmok.com

I second MP4s in H.264. That's what we send out to random (PC based) offices and so far no-one has not been able to watch them. Small, efficient, good quality pics that play pretty much anywhere.

Thanks!

Thank you Nick.

First of all, Windows Media Player is built into most PCs. I deliver some stuff to some corporate clients and they want WMV, partly because many of them are still running computers from 6-8 years ago, and they cannot upgrade their software. So if you ask me, WMV9 is the safest way to go.

>I have been exporting via quicktime conversion rendering all day to a custom .avi of 5000 KBytes/sec

What do you mean by custom avi? To encode an avi that is compatible with many older machines, you can try using the Divx codec. FFMPEGX does it. FCP and Mpeg Streamclip do not do avis properly.



www.strypesinpost.com

Thank you.

Thank you very much for the tips i really appreciate it, was unaware of the program you mentioned, just downloaded it and am ready to export.

The scenario re: the older machines is identical to what i am confronted with...could you please share with me from your experience what the best settings/codec are?...

i all ready delivered the "custom" avi which as you pointed out fcp does not do avi's very well so i went in and modified the avi settings to match the native frame rate and dimensions and bumped the KBytes/sec to what Vimeo has as their HD optimum of 5,000. It is marginally passable with a couple of flickers here and there.

Thank you very much.

Best,
John

Avi is a wrapper. I'm not sure what codec you are using.

WMV9 would be fairly safe, but a general note is that if you use older codecs, you sacrifice a bit of quality, but you may get better compatibility amongst older machines. And there are still some machines running Windows XP. For WMV, you need to purchase Flip4mac.



www.strypesinpost.com

hi, the native codec of the piece is DVCPROHD 1080p30

i don't see a wmv option...what do you suggest is the best option?

thanks so much.

best,
john

To export a WMV via QuickTime, FCP or anything QuickTime-related, you have to get Flip4Mac -- probably Studio or higher. And you can't just use the free trial version, which will truncate your piece.

[www.telestream.net]


www.derekmok.com

thanks i will check it out.

best,
john

I second the Flip4Mac Studio. I have been using it for years and it is fast transcoding and the image is good. It also gives you different options as far as image size and bits/sec.

God Bless,

Douglas Villalba
director/cinematographer/editor
Miami, Florida

[www.DouglasVillalba.info]
[www.youtube.com]
[vimeo.com]

Hey, I second the MPEG-4s in H.264 codec. Here is my out workflow for windows compatibility.
export self contained .mov file. Compressor it to a QT .mov file, video h.264 with a decent bitrate, audio acc, etc. (Vimeo has a great [url=

]Compressor walkthru[/url] on this, just be sure to use your own bitrate)
So out of Compressor you have a .mov file compressed with H.264, here's the Windows compatibility trick. Open the .mov file in QT and export to Mpeg-4. Here are the settings, File format:MPG4 (not mpeg4 IMSA) Video:passthrough Audio:passthrough. The resulting .mp4 will be compatible in windows and playstation 3s.
Hope this helps. Stole the [url=http://prolost.com/blog/2009/3/16/convert-h264-quicktime-to-ps3.html]workflow from Stu[/url].