Better compression on the Mac with x264

Jim Geduldick (@FILMBOT) has an new x264 Encoder Tutorial for as an alternative to the QuickTime codec for producing H.264 files on the Mac (embedded below).

This video tutorial is on Already Been Done, a skateboarding resource. As usual, there's are other tutorials, for example one by Satya Meka, Quick Tip – Better Compression With X264. And there were tips and utilities before that, some found in More on Quicktime’s H.264 gamma bug at AE Portal.


Jim Geduldick: H.264 files / x264 Encoder Tutorial from Already Been Done on Vimeo.

Five H.264 encoding tools compared

Jan Ozer posted a video comparing the performance, quality, and H.264 controls of Adobe Media Encoder (AME), Apple Compressor, Microsoft Expression Encoder, Sorenson Squeeze, and Telestream Episode Pro. The best quality was produced by 3 apps that license the Main Concept codec.

Adobe's AME (bundled with Premiere) is the fastest, produces about as high quality as others, though the controls are limited. Also embedded below is a demo of AME by John Dickinson.

Encoding WebM: a first pass [+ 2nd pass for HEVC-H.265]

Update: codec development has moved on with HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding), a new version of WebM to compete, and other schemes.  

For details on the new AdobeWebM plug-in -- and more -- see WebM and HEVC in Premiere and After Effects at PVC.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Original post:

Whatever your views on h.264, there may be a call to encode to WebM since pay per or subscription video using h.264 will eventually require a license fee if you ship many units over 12 minutes. The official WebM Project has a list of tools that encode to the WebM container, but here are some additional highlights:

• Sorenson Squish is among several free-to-try online services springing up.

• SUPER now installs spyware and must be avoided in 2013 (OpenCandy in the guise of browser toolbar, even if you choose not to install it).  ***WAS: the Windows freeware GUI frontend, seems to have implemented the FFMEG patch. Super is quirky but packed with features and easy to use, though you may wonder why it wants to call home surreptitiously.

• The rest of the GUIs for FFMPEG are bound to follow. If you must have command line control, see Encoding WebM Video with ffmpeg Dive Into HTML5 by Mark Pilgram.

• A QuickTime component is in early development.

• Andy Beach posted a video on Using WebM in Episode 6.

• Jan Ozer surveyed the scene last month in How to Encode to WebM. He later posted a video, WebM Encoding Tools: Five Popular Encoders Compared.

Exporting from Premiere Pro CS5

via @AdobePremiere, Jeff Bellune shows how to export video from Premiere Pro CS5. He covers the important gotchas of Export Settings and the Adobe Media Encoder (AME) UI, except for dealing with source-output frame size changes.

Note that CUDA exceleration can make exports faster, for example when scaling, especially with a next generation card like the GeForce 470. Encoding is not currently accelerated in hardware; the Elemental Encoder plug-in for Premiere wasn't developed for CS5.

Adobe TV has several other videos on exporting video & stills and on AME. Here's how to export just a still, which is a bit faster than exporting to AME:

1000 iterations of YouTube compression

Old news in Internet time, Canzona posted a video composed of examples of 1000 iterations of YouTube compression. An homage to Alvin Lucier, "this piece explores the 'photocopy effect', where upon repeated copies the object begin to accumulate the idiosyncrasies of the medium doing the copying." (via Videomaker)

Adobe demos nVidia CUDA acceleration for compression and RED

fxguidetv #068 features part of an Adobe tech demo of nVidia acceleration of RED video files from an IBC 2009 recap from Amsterdam (along with news from davinci-Blackmagic, Eyeon, Avid, Nuke, etc).

The Adobe demos were at the nVidia booth showing technology using nVidia's CUDA architecture, and showed only what looked like filters in Premiere that accelerated playback of with multiple transform, blur, and color correction filters. Performance so far is playback up to 5 RED RAW clips with 8-12 filters.

We might be hearing more about this and more from nVidia's GPU Tecnology Conference starting today in San Jose. Among the interesting talks is a Keynote with Richard Kerris of Lucasfilm who is to "provide a glimpse of what’s on the horizon for GPU’s in future and how it will impact filmmaking."

Compressor for network renders and Vimeo HD

Final Cut Producer posted a couple of tutorials for Apple Compressor. One covers network rendering via Ethernet for 2 computers; the other one is hosted and explains HD Video Encoding for Vimeo using Compressor. YouTube of course doesn't do HD.

How to Encode Faster in Compressor with Apple Qmaster from Andy Coon on Vimeo.


HD Video Encoding for Vimeo using Compressor from Ed McNichol on Vimeo.

VisualHub reborn as open source FilmRedux

VisualHub, a simple but smart video encoding tool for Mac OS X might have a future in the open source community. Details, such as they are, can be found at APC's VisualHub gets reborn as FilmRedux, goes open source. The old Techspansion site also refers to TranscoderRedux an open source transcoder project for OS X.

Cracking the H.264 Codecs

Jan Ozer has a couple of good articles on h.264:

Cracking the H.264 Codec looks at a few H.264 codecs available, each with different configurable parameters, but mostly encoding tools with different sets of compression options.

So Many H.264 Codecs, So Little Time compares H.264 files produced using codecs from Apple, Dicas, and MainConcept (the last is licensed by Adobe). Ozer didn't use Visual Hub (Mac, $23), which Andy Beach found to be faster and yield a bit better results at default settings than the other apps he tested in a recent comparison (later expanded and updated) at Real World Video Compression.

As mentioned earlier in Flash H.264 fast start, fees, MSU also compared H.264 codec quality (MainConcept beat other participants). You have to dig to find practicals, so if you're interested in quality Fabio Sonnati has pushed Flash to the limit with low data rates,

"I use a mix of Ffmpeg, x264, Mencoder and Nero AAC. Here some parameters used: 5 reference frames, 5 B-frames, authomatic B-Frames, B-pyramid enabled, adaptive macroblock type, advanced Trellis on, Subq=7, advanced exagon search, deblocking filter with custom alpha e beta parameter, three pass encoding..."

Also, Adobe engineer Tinic Uro's post and comments on H.264 has many interesting details on Flash and MP4.

On a side note, in Optimal frame dimensions for Flash video, Adobe is now saying that h.264 (encoding or playback) is optimized for 16x16 samples, rather than 4 or 8. Adobe also posted a Flash video bitrate calculator by Robert Reinhardt. Looking through papers on the web (H.264/MPEG-4 AVC from Wikipedia or IEEE Overview of the H.264/AVC is a start) it’s hard to tell if 16x16 is really best -- it seems to be rather how the encoder is implemented (in chroma sampling for example). Anyway if 16x16 is optimal, presets for the various Adobe applications should reflect this -- though they don't so far.

Update: in a new article (8/25/08) Ken Stone talks about how to get decent QuickTime H.264 movies from FCP for the Web and similar companion article (9/8/08) Compressor H.264 movies from FCP for the Web.

Jan Ozer also has a video tutorial that shows the new features in Rhozet's Carbon Coder 3.0, including the Carbon Administrator, which now contains the Queue Manager and the enhanced watch folder functions.
.

Mac Encoder Shootout

Andy Beach's blog Real World Video Compression (book review) posted Encoder Shootout - A Comparison of 4 Mac Compression Tools -- and the $23 app seemed to do well.

Use iPod Nano settings for Zune

I like Zune fine but it's not better than the iPod and iTunes (read about MS strategically innovating off Apple Spotlight search for a parallel). The navigation is not quite as easy and the software and the way it works with the hardware is still kludgy, despite having a few features up on iTunes. Integration with WiMP was expected, but the new app is more unwieldy, maybe do to DRM concerns.

You can get around not having shows on Zune marketplace by using iTunes to subscribe and download and set Zune software to pick up the files from the iTunes folder. That idea is sorta obvious but you can find real tips via CNET's Crave or Lifehacker, who pick news and tips from Zune fan sites.

In any case, if you're exporting video for the smaller Zune, you can use the iPod Nano preset found in many utilities.

Hardware encoders for h.264 and MPEG-2

The Elgato h.264 USB thumb drive encoder was mentioned here a few months ago and has competition from a $3,495 PCI-E card and from a similar device also priced around $100. Actually, I kinda wonder if the Elgato is the same product under a different label as Instant Video To-Go by ADS Tech (from April 2007), who claims "With software conversion often taking 4 -10 times longer than real time, Instant Video To-Go video transfer accelerator converts up to 5 times faster than real time..." The Editblog's result with the Elgato device weren't that good. [update from MacWorld: same USB device but branded for different OSes, Elgato takes the Mac side while ADS retains Windows]

ADS Tech has another product that accelerates Adobe CS3 Production Premium applications. Pyro Kompressor HD is a $3,495 PCI Express "solution that accelerates HD MPEG-2 and HD H.264/AVC encoding up to eight times faster than software-only video compression." According to Macworld, the $3,495 package "supports watch folders for job automation, upscaling and downscaling, frame rate conversion, custom settings, chapter support, batch encoding to handle multiple tasks, drag and drop, control over target output file size, and muxing, or combining, streams from different input files ...and includes decoders for DV, MPEG-1, MPEG-2, H.264, AVCHD, AVC-Intra, VC1, DVCPRO 25/50/100, DVCPRO-HD, JPEG2000 and YUV files, along with import support for DirectShow and QuickTime files."

The technology behind this product by Ambric is the world's first teraOPS-class processor.

Elgato h.264 USB thumb drive encoder

Studio Daily notes a review of the Elgato Turbo.264 USB thumb drive encoder at Ken Stone's website. It looks pretty cool for $99 and should be even more handy when Adobe Media Player is finalized.

The best overviews on AMP and h.264 still seems to be Flash engineer Tinic Uro's What just happened to video on the web? and New File Extensions and MIME Types.

Tim Siglin at EventDV noted that Tinic mentioned a 'fast-start' trap on files compressed for download in tools like AE and Premiere. For now "the moov atom (which is the index information in MPEG-4 files) is at the beginning of the file....you have to wait until the file is completely downloaded before it is played back. You can use tools like qt-faststart.c written by our own Mike Melanson to fix your files so that the index is at the beginning of the file."

Adobe Device Central video demo

Mobi-lize has a video demo of Adobe's Device Central. Device Central is cool but I'd prefer something like Compressor (new HDV>SD tutorial), which Apple gives you in Final Cut Studio. Adobe India is probably loaded with talent, so God knows why Adobe Media Encoder is so limited.

But wait there's more: at DNM, Ko Maruyama has a 3D Type QuickTip for AE CS3; plus Jayse Hansen demonstrates how to create growing graphic elements in AE, one of many AE tutorials at Creative Cow. Meanwhile at DNM, Jeff Schell shows some new features in Premiere Pro CS3, where smart bins is hyperbole but bundled apps are not..

Super, a free ffmpeg UI for Windows

NOTE: in 2013 Super installs malware no matter how you try to avoid it. It tales a very long time to get rid of it, so do yourself a favor and use FFMPEG X, Handbrake, MPEG Streamclip, or other.

On Windows ffmpeg front-ends are a jungle of limitations, and free tools are not as well-done as Mac apps ffmpeg OS X or iSquint, or VisualHub shareware.

I found that I did like Super by eRightSoft: it's freeware, full-featured with output for many devices and codecs, and you can batch. If you jump through the hoops to find the installer, it comes with codecs but you might want to install a codec pack with FFDSHOW like K-Lite or Gordian Knot for full compatibility and mad controls.

Note that there's a free version of ZoneAlarm if the Windows firewall doesn't make you feel safe, because this baby dials home on its own.

ffmpegX for 640x480 h.264 in updated 5G iPods

ffmpegX 0.0.9x was released, adding an "iPod H.264 w640" preset to support new high-resolution 640x480 h.264 in updated 5G iPods.
.

They want you to transfer YouTube videos to DVD

What to tell friends that want you to transfer YouTube videos to DVD: "try it."

Use the Firefox browser and install the Firefox extension "VideoDownloader." You can find cool FF extensions in Firefox in Tools>Extensions>Get More Extensions.

Then load the YouTube movie click on the VideoDownloader icon and right click to save link as, but rename the link to xxx.flv (it's really Flash). If you know how the play Flash movies, great; others need something like Wimpy Standalone FLV Player. Then use your laptop's video out to play back on a TV.

Otherwise download iSquint/Mac and convert the Flash file to QuickTime. You can use your laptop's video out to play back on a TV. If you want a DVD, get iSquint's $23 sibling VisualHub, which lets you easily convert to many formats. An alternative would be Roxio Popcorn, which also shrinks oversized DVDs down to single layer size. Then use iDVD or another app to finish the job.
.

Visual Hub video converter

Visual Hub, from the maker of iSquint the iPod video conversion app for Mac OS X, is a one stop shop for all kinds of digital video conversions -- even Flash and PSP.
.