Codec to send footage over the Internet

I'm starting a new workflow where I'm shooting abroad and want to be able to upload footage to an FTP, whereupon someone in the US can download and cut it... then send the project file back to me for relinking. Since the HD online footage is far too large, I was considering making an offline compression of the footage. I'm looking to make a compressor preset that's 1 gigabyte for an hour of footage (or less). The Offline RT HD Photo Jpeg setting has adequate picture quality, but is still too big... coming in at about 1.8 GB an hour of footage. After playing around with the settings I realized that Offline RT has no audio compression. When I use audio compression... I always have to end up rendering the audio tracks in FCP. So my question is whether there is a way to use compressed audio in a codec and not have to render it. If I can get that, I can get the data rates low enough to make this feasible.

Using FCP 6.

Hi, you can use an mpeg 4 preset in compressor or from FCP's batch export tool, then get the guy at the other end to transpcode to something usable like dv. I did that off a bunch of proxy files recently as I had some issues with a batch of footage I received. Worked like a charm, and fast too, if you have Qmaster configured properly.



www.strypesinpost.com

Yeah, you're probably right. I wanted to make it as simple as possible for the person on the downloading end, but I just think there's no way around having to re-compress it back on their end.

You can send them a Compressor droplet to make it easier on their end. Or they can cut off the mpeg4 files in a dv timeline (may be a little crashy and slow and motion attributes may not come off properly due to the change in frame size).



www.strypesinpost.com

Yeah, I'll make the droplet for sure. For the reason of motion attributes you were saying I will probably make it scale back up to 1080 even though it'll be blocky. Thanks for the input!

No prob. Run a short test to make sure it works before you go head on into it.



www.strypesinpost.com

you could try modifying the OfflineRT sequence setting by using a smaller frame-size.

i just did a test by asking the media manager to recompress an hours worth of NTSC footage i have (i work mainly with PAL),
and changing the frame size to multimedia Small (240x180) brings it down to 1.3G per Hr.

you just wont get any RT effects with that custom footage,
but it may not be a problem.

i was using 29.97fps media,
what is your framerate?
weirdly when i change my use 23.98 as a framerate on my "recompress to" setting i get 1.5G per hour.


nick

>you just wont get any RT effects with that custom footage,
>but it may not be a problem.

For that reason, it may be better using mpeg4 or h.264 as a transportation codec.For that reason, FCP X may make a more decent tool as it lets you optimize your media on import, although much questions can be asked about the ability to re-link.



www.strypesinpost.com

depends if it's a complex edit, or a first cut / assembly sort of thing.
rendering the odd dissolve or text wont hurt too much.

Strypes, how would you go about keeping the original file's TC and Reel#?

hey, thinking about the original question re compressing audio,
i just created a compressor setting that was basically Offline RT NTSC, but with audio compressed to AAC.

i compressed 42 seconds of NTSC media
with audio left uncompressed the file was 12.5MB
with audio compressed audio was 5MB!

so you'd get around 600MB per hour with that.

TC was intact, sorry no Reel# on my test footage

if you are interested compressor settings were
Compression Type = PhotoJpeg @ Low quality.
Audio set to AAC (i didn't change any other settings)

the resulting file played nice in an OfflineRT sequence, (other than the sound which needed rendering)

with the audio make sure you go STEREO if your original is stereo,
otherwise you could have trouble reconnecting on your end.
if your original audio is more than 2 tracks, you may have difficulty connecting.



nick

Sorry, I forgot to mention this earlier. Use the qt wrapper for mpeg 4, not the default mp4 wrapper. You can modify the option by tweaking from the h.264 presets. Make sure you jeep the same frame rate. QuickTimes created with Compressor and the batch export tool can keep timecodes and reel names and if I remember correctly, also clip UIDs so you can recapture from your P2 or SxS cards through log and transfer.



www.strypesinpost.com

Okay, so I've got I've kicked this can a little bit farther down the road. We did a project where we compressed (in compressor) ProResHQ 1080p24 footage down to an H264 25% of source size, with the quality half way between low and medium. That gives you around 810 mb per hour of footage. We ended up just doing Audio pass through, by the way. Footage renders in doubletime on my machine, which isn't too bad.

Then we sent those web files over the Internet. The editor used a droplet to uprez the footage to ProRes Proxy at full 1920x1080 and did his cut. When sending the project file back, we were able to relink successfully. FYI, we don't have special timecode on our clips, each clip starts at 00:00:00:00 and the footage comes from SD cards.

Thanks for all the suggestions!

No prob. Glad to hear things worked out!



www.strypesinpost.com