[Ti] encoding video

[Chris Olson]

On May 19, 2006, at 2:09 PM, Dr Trevor J. Hutley wrote:

> Chris - I now see that there many options available for the H264  
> encoding process.
>
> Which parameters do you use, to get such high quality?

If the movie is not widescreen format I resize or crop it with a mask  
to 640 x 480 (standard NTSC TV res), then use the "Movie to iPod  
(320x240)" encode which is very fast and about the same quality as  
the videos you buy on iTMS.  These will also play on your iPod as  
well as scaling perfectly fine to 800 x 600 resolution on a big  
screen TV set to NTSC.  You may see some very minor pixelation in  
dark areas (blacks and browns), however lowering the contrast on your  
TV doesn't detract too much from picture quality and gets rid of most  
the pixelation.

If the movie is widescreen format I encode it at 720p resolution,  
30fps, automatic data rate, automatic key frames, best quality, multi- 
pass encode.  However I never use my PowerBook to encode 720p video -  
I have a DP PowerMac G4 with the cpu's overclocked to 1.92 Ghz that I  
use for encoding HDV.  The PowerMac will spend a good 7-8 hours  
encoding a feature length 720p movie.  I have no idea how long it  
would take the PowerBook, as I never tried it.
-- 
Chris

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