Movie transcoding advice: Does anyone have a good recipe?

August 13, 2007 9:52 AM

Movie transcoding advice: Does anyone have a good recipe?

I have a Canon SD700 which makes 640x480 video, 30 fps, mono, in the MJPEG AVI format. Unfortunately, while these files are pretty good quality, they are not compressed really well. I'd like to archive them in a more compressed form while retaining about 90% of the quality. I've tried a number of codecs (Divx, Xvid, Quicktime H264, 3ivx, Sorenson 3, etc), but haven't found a good combination of settings to balance the file size and the quality. I've been hoping to use a bit rate in between 2000-3000, however so far the video tends to lose its texture. Maybe I'm being unrealistic.

Here are the best "recipes" I've found so far:

1. XVid - Original size, original framerate, 2 pass, 3000kbs, MP3 mono 128k, 41000hz.

2. Quicktime - appleTV default settings (H264, aac). I'm not very sure of the original settings, they seem VBR.

Notes:

* I have a Intel Mac Pro, so I can use a program on either "side."
* As long as the codec isn't too far off the beaten path, I'll use it
* If required, I don't care if the program/codec costs money. I'm more focused on results right now
* I'm not concerned about speed, just quality

Any recommendations, tweaks that I'm not using? I know these settings are subjective, but I'm hoping someone has some insight or experience with this particular source movie.

posted by colecovizion to Computers & Internet (4 answers total)

It's been a while since I played with this, but I think doing some preprocessing before compression could help. Try adding a little sharpening to preserve some of the texture.

A friend uses DiVX because he thinks it maintains a little more fine detail than XVid or h.264, but that may just be a matter of the way the defaults are set.

You might also try a few baselines:
MPEG1 or 2 at 8Mbps VBR
Either XVid or H.264 at 4-5Mbps

Or just buy some hard disks. Nothing you encode to is going to preserve the suitability of MJPEG for editing. I picked up a 400GB HDD and an external enclosure for $130 recently, and they are probably even cheaper now.
posted by Good Brain at 11:11 AM on August 13, 2007

Response by poster: Thanks for the comments Good Brian, I'll give them a try. I have a few big HDD already, but I like to keep my data "lean" as a good habit. :)
posted by colecovizion at 12:25 PM on August 13, 2007

Keeping data lean is not a good video practice. Never throw away video data except as a last resort.
posted by trinity8-director at 12:32 PM on August 13, 2007

Response by poster: These are just for home movies when I don't have my HD cam around. I know from experience that I'm never going to go back and edit/repurpose them past my initial edits before the transcoding. Thanks though!
posted by colecovizion at 1:04 PM on August 13, 2007