Three from The Nines
In preparation for the trailer competition, I wanted to see how footage from the movie would hold up when subjected to the Flash compression of YouTube and the other video-sharing sites. So I uploaded three clips in various formats to experiment.
The results? Two clips look surprisingly great. The third looks like ass.
The difference isn’t in the format, or the file size, but the background. The ass-y clip has a forest of sun-dappled leaves in the background, and the compression algorithms freak out trying to handle the level of detail. That’s not unique to Flash; sun-dappling is pretty much the bete noir of video. Several resources recommended applying a soften filter to tamp down the background noise. While it reduced the overall file size, it didn’t end up helping the video quality much.
In the end, the h.264 format ended up working out best for me, but as always, YMMV.1
The clips are from the DVD that goes out to television stations, for use in reviews and news stories. They show the three different looks in the movie.
- Conveniently, the iPhone and AppleTV both use this format, which makes it easy to carry clips (and trailers) with me. ↩
Articles
July 27th, 2007 at 4:48 am
Not related, but I thought you might like this.
Wow, that sounds like spam.
July 27th, 2007 at 5:23 am
What are you doing up at 4.12AM?
July 27th, 2007 at 5:24 am
What are you doing up at 4.12AM?
Loved the clips by the way. Especially the first.
July 27th, 2007 at 5:42 am
Well, obviously he just got called by the guy from my link above. It all makes sense.
July 27th, 2007 at 7:19 am
Thanks for sharing the clips! Even with the quality issues, “A Videogame God” piqued my interest the most.
July 27th, 2007 at 8:38 am
Damn you freaky compression algorithms… DAAAMN YOU!!
July 27th, 2007 at 12:56 pm
Can’t wait.
July 27th, 2007 at 1:05 pm
Really nice scenes (or part-scenes). The actor is very good; relaxed, kind of low-key yet he has a commanding screen presence.
Have you decided how much footage you are going to make available for the trailer competition?
July 27th, 2007 at 2:58 pm
Anna (#9):
The trailer footage is substantial. Too substantial at the moment — 1.8GB. But we’ll get it down to a manageable level for downloading. We pretty much included every shot in the trailer, along with handles, and some extra stuff as well.
July 29th, 2007 at 1:04 am
apparently youtube is converting their entire library to h264:
“…Moody said that YouTube will soon be encoding videos in the H.264 streaming-efficient compression format preferred by Apple TV, and that all new videos submitted to YouTube as of the mid-June launch of the AppleTV update will be playable by the device. From then until fall, YouTube will be encoding its entire back-catalog in H.264 format, adding videos in chunks until everything is accessible to Apple TV users. Direct links and the on-screen keyboard-based search engine mentioned in our previous update will bring you to current and old videos alike.”
from ilounge - apple deal
July 29th, 2007 at 8:47 am
Are there any plans to spread a torrent around, John?
By the way: interesting footage, I really, really can´t wait to see the movie. Hope I´ll have a chance here in Germany.