Comments

Eugenia wrote on 10/24/2008, 2:29 PM
These "quality sliders" that you also find on a lot of Apple's products make no sense to me. Unless you are offered specific encoder options to optimize the encoder, and a bitrate input box, that quality sliders stuff, seem utterly weird to me too.
Chienworks wrote on 10/24/2008, 6:32 PM
The quality slider is a speed vs. accuracy tradeoff. If you set the slider to low quality the encoder will run faster by taking shortcuts and the result might be less wonderful. If you set the quality slider to high quality then the encoder will take all the time it needs to produce the best result possible at the cost of substantially longer times. Generally, unless you're editing for national broadcast news and the air deadline is in 5 minutes, there's not much use for anything other than highest quality.

This is different from the bitrate settings, where you're telling the encoder how many bits it may use to represent the material. Both settings affect quality, but in different ways.

Actually, i would say that the quality slider is less important when you use higher bitrates, but vitally important if you're squishing down to a web delivery bitrate.
Eugenia wrote on 10/24/2008, 7:04 PM
This is the same as the provider (in this case Vegas) not giving you a front end for encoder options but instead a canned option similar to the ones found in Ulead. Personally, I prefer to have access to the encoder options, even if these options won't be understandable by 99% of the users, than a dumb slider that doesn't let you customize the encoder the way you want to and doesn't show you what it actually does. A lot of people can't use the open source x264 encoder in the command line because it's so complex with all the options it's got. But for someone who knows how to work them out, it offers flexibility.