QuickTime Options

[Steve Robertson]

I asked a similar question back when I was using iMovie: What are the 
best options to use when creating a QuickTime movie from a DV project?

Now I'm using FCE. The latest project was a 5 minute music video. Since 
I've never found much documentation on QuickTime, I decided to 
experiment. I decided to make all the sample QuickTime movies with a 
360 by 240 player window and 30 frames per second. The default codec in 
FCE is simply labeled "Video." Using the Video codec and specifying 
High quality, I got a very nice looking QuickTime movie of 29.8 MB. The 
Video Medium movie still looks pretty good and is 11.9 MB

Switching to Sorenson 3, the resulting High quality movie exhibited 
more pixellation than the first movie, and the file size was 81.6 MB. I 
tried Sorenson 3 Medium quality, hoping for a smaller file size, but I 
got a worse looking movie taking the same 81.6 MB.

Switching to MP4, High quality, I got a movie with too much pixellation 
and a file size of - you guessed it- 81.6 MB! I didn't bother with MP4 
Medium quality.

So are there deeply hidden QuickTime options that are preventing me 
from achieving the superior quality with Sorenson codecs that others 
have reported? Anybody found good documentation on QuickTime?

Steve R.