Encoding with H.264

[Max Veteran]

I tried encoding a 2 minute movie with H.264 a few hours ago. I must say I am dissapointed. Please say I'm doing something wrong.

The movie ended up being exported from iMovie @ H.264/256kb. The file was 6.2MB. I thought that it was going to be an excellent quality movie, just like the uncompressed DV format it was before. It wasn't.

I contacted my Mac friend Photo Monkey. He says that to take full advantage of the H.264 codec I need a G5 processor.

Whats going on here?

[shodan]

Well I think much depends of what you're trying to encode, what was the original? Because if you're trying to encode some videos taken with a dv camera i doubt you'll get something better then the old codec... I believe you should have an HD camera and try.

[radioboy]

even with H.264 256kb/sec bitrate isn't going to give you super high quality video

play with settings, experiment

encoding H.264 is the same on a G3, G4, G5, whatever... why would you need a G5 to use the codec

[Endoscient]

He might mean it is jsut optimized to encode much faster on G5

[Bling3k12]

H.264 works just fine on a G4. The HD resolution of H.264 really taxes the G4, so it's not usable at all. That may be what he was referring to.

Also, make sure in the Quality slider, always choose Best. Sometimes this is an oversight for some people, they think it will make it bigger by selecting Best.

Edit: I'm gonna export an iMovie I made in H.264 just to check it out. Used 256kb/sec as the limit. We'll see how it turns out.

Edit 2: I'm starting to think the iMovie encoder somehow sucks. Just completely blows. No matter what I do, the results are horrible. I select Automatic (for data rate) and the quality is amazing, but a 31 second movie at 480 x 260 is 42MB! Maybe this is acceptable for playing off a CD, but not for digital distribution, unless file size/bandwidth issues aren't a problem.

Top: 297 kbits/sec

Bottom: 11405 kbits/sec

Edited May 2, 2005 by Bling3k12

[Max Veteran]

Hm, looks like H264 has a problem with interlacing :/ I'll try some more stuff tonight.

[Bling3k12]

That's more of an iMovie problem. No matter what encoder I use, it does that. When in Final Cut Pro, I usually de-interlace projects for the web.

[SapUMBC]

Any of you have QT Pro? Export it from iMovie and then open it in QT Pro and re-export it with H264. If it still sucks, then there's a problem. Though I have to say, the Apple Galleries are encoded at 6400kbps and the resolution is 1280x532... I would guess iMovie is having an issue (or a setting is borked) for a movie to come out looking that bad.

[SapUMBC]

I just did a little test of my own on an iMovie project, DV NTSC movie.

320x240, 24fps

256kbps H.264 Video, 128kbps AAC Audio

Duration: 3:12

Filesize: 8.6MB

Looks absolutely wonderful for me... I don't know what you're doing (or if it is an installation problem) that is screwing it up though.

http://grab.onlyinkenya.com/movie.tiff

http://grab.onlyinkenya.com/settings1.tiff

http://grab.onlyinkenya.com/settings2.tiff

(Sorry for the TIFF's, too lazy to change 'em :p )

[generalnewbie]

how does the file size compare to say divx codec.. if you were to encode the same source in xvid/divx and then in the new h264 where do the quality vs size issue go?

is the quality the same.. or better and what about size

[TheLegendOfMart]

  Max? said:

Hm, looks like H264 has a problem with interlacin:/:/ I'll try some more stuff tonight.

585861199[/snapback]

H264 doesnt have a problem with interlacing, Apples implementation might do..... Ive just recently switched from xvid to x264 for all my encodes and ive never looked back.

[generalnewbie]

care to show a example or screenshot of xvid source and x264 source