help: better quality Quicktime .mov encoding?

john-beale wrote on 2/20/2007, 12:05 PM
I need a quick refresher on Quicktime encoding. The customer has specified that they need video for their webpage in Quicktime format. Normally I encode my web video from Vegas 7d as mp4 using the H.264 codec and I am satisfied with it. My MPEG-4 Quicktime encode of the same project at the same resolution & bitrate do not look as good, and the sound quality is also inferior. I am wondering if Vegas is giving me something lower quality than MPEG-4 level 10 (AVC / H.264).

I know that Quicktime 7 does support H.264. Do I need to buy Apple's Quicktime Pro in order to create it?

Comments

john-beale wrote on 2/20/2007, 1:38 PM
Well QT7 Pro is only $30 so I just got it. Using the H.264 codec it does produce better quality Quicktime video (at a given bitrate) than Vegas 7d, and with AAC the audio quality is greatly improved. I've seen comments elsewhere that it is slow to encode, but so far it seems quite usable. I haven't tried any long jobs.
craftech wrote on 2/20/2007, 5:00 PM
John,
H264 may be tough for some people to play when visiting the person's webpage. Sorenson 3 seems to be the most reasonble quality that anyone can play. Ask Dave (FrigidNDEditing). He uses that codec via Squeeze (I think). He has samples on his webpage.

John
CClub wrote on 2/20/2007, 7:30 PM
I agree that the QT H264 render looks better than the Vegas mp4 (bitrates being equal). What are you doing for this, though... rendering to avi in Vegas then importing into QT for re-render into H264?
FrigidNDEditing wrote on 2/20/2007, 7:33 PM
Sorry John, I think you've got me mixed up with someone else. I don't use QT at all really. And my "webpage" is just a place holder more or less. (I should really do something about that). I use the mp4 encoding with Sony for my stuff a lot, so that might be what you're thinking about, but I encode to that direct from Vegas.

Dave
FrigidNDEditing wrote on 2/20/2007, 7:37 PM
CClub, why not just use Debug Mode Frameserve? It's ideal for encoding into something that Vegas doesn't do natively. I use it to shoot over to a flash file.

Dave
john-beale wrote on 2/20/2007, 7:39 PM
Thanks for the tip, I will offer them the choice of Sorenson 3 or H264. No doubt they want the widest audience for the video.

To get the H264 file I first exported to a quicktime .mov as "uncompressed" from Vegas, and then opened that .mov in QT 7.1 Pro and exported to H264. However, it seems there is another problem with the H264 QT video: it shows up with a different gamma value (brighter and more washed out) than the original uncompressed QT file, using the same QT 7.1 player. Different presentations with different monitors, or different software I can understand, but I think different brightness in playback from the same player has to be a bug. You can see the difference here: QT7 contrast problem screenshot



craftech wrote on 2/21/2007, 3:18 PM
Sorry John, I think you've got me mixed up with someone else. I don't use QT at all really. And my "webpage" is just a place holder more or less. (I should really do something about that). I use the mp4 encoding with Sony for my stuff a lot, so that might be what you're thinking about, but I encode to that direct from Vegas.

Dave
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You are right Dave. Sorry about that. I checked back. It was Jay Gladwell. I hot-linked his page with the Sorenson 3 videos.

John
Former user wrote on 2/21/2007, 4:04 PM
FrigidNDEditing,

I tried using the Frameserver to serve to QT Pro and could not get it to work. Have you done this successfully?

Dave T2
GlennChan wrote on 2/21/2007, 5:11 PM
John: Try adding the "studio RGB to computer RGB" color corrector preset to your Vegas output- that should fix part of it.

However, on top of that, there seems to be a lot of other stuff going on. Changing the gamma on your Vegas output by 1.8 / 2.2 seems like it will get you closer, but not exactly like the other method. It might have something to do with Quicktime applying color management.