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Recently on Forums: Choosing the Right Video Format

by Peter Kirn

Live visualism needs a format that a) isn’t so huge it eats your hard drive, b) can be decoded and processed by your computer without bringing your CPU to its needs (DV compression causes some issues here), and c) still looks good, especially when scratched. We’ve had a great discussion going on the forums, in case you missed it:

Favorite Video Standards

Here’s the basic consensus:

  1. Codec: Motion JPEG (for interlaced footage) or Photo JPEG.
  2. Compression ratio/quality: Quality 80 is a decent baseline for JPEG, though you can crank as high as 97 to improve quality.
  3. Keyframes: Encode a keyframe on every frame so it’s “scratch-ready”.
  4. Alpha channels: For video containing alpha channels, PNG is the format of choice. (See comments.)

Now, I have successfully mixed two DV streams at full resolution; modern machines can handle the decoding. But, of course, this stuff is far more practical for use in terms of efficiency and size.

Next up: tips for improving performance in live video streams. I’ve got some new hardware and software I’ll be working with, and will share what I learn. In the meantime, any nominations (or questions) in that regard?

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  • http://abstrakt.vade.info/ vade

    It should be noted that, if you need alpha channel support, your only options are RLE encoded Animation or PNG. Both work quite well, but Animation, being run length encoded acts as uncompressed video and if your video is of any decent size, fraemrate and comlexity of picture you will definitely need to be aware of bandwidth constraints.

  • chris

    Yay png. alpha, finally.

  • shaijnoua

    ok, but what is the best software to use for doing this, cause i've had s lot of trouble trying to find one that can compress more files at once, and do them properly…??? (i'm a noob vj)

  • http://kraftma.g4.gs _kraftma_

    compressing more than one file is easy with after effects…import all files and send them to the renderlist, with one click the have all the same compressing settings, another click and ae renders them…and you can get some coffee…

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  • http://discodirt.10pm.org M-.-n

    To handle HD / 1080p we found out that H.264 works actually better than PhotoJPEG. For smaller resolution tho, PhotoJPEG works better.

  • vectorsa

    Anyone use anything else other than quicktime?

  • te2rx

    HuffYUV supports alpha. It's an extremely fast lossless codec. It won't be as size-efficient as PNG/CorePNG but it also won't be as taxing to decode in realtime — http://neuron2.net/www.math.berkeley.edu/benrg/hu…

  • http://wileywiggins.com Wiley

    Wait, there's a motion png?

    H.264 kicks the tar out of photo jpeg.

  • http://drnz.tv drnz

    for the non-quicktime heads, ligos indeo 5.2 is a a pretty decent choice, encodes quickly, scales well and holds quality.
    However, it seems that the widescale adoption of h.264 for would point in that direction for future proofing content…..

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    Hello World

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