- News and Technology – with Mark and Derek
- Mark at WEVA
- Stock20–$7/song music library, 6 new entries/month.
- Triple Scoop Music—stock by Grammy-winning artists, but at non-commercial lengths
- Panasonic LCD field production monitors w/ waveform monitor, some HD-ready
- Caseworld.tv
- Disc Makers: new unit, silk-screen options for 300+ order
- Teac dye-sub disc printer
- Azden field mixer
- Citi DiskDISK HD now shipping: 100GB $1,049; 120GB $1,195
- Sony acquires Grouper
- DivX Stage6 Product:
- Apple battery recall, 1.8M 8/03-8/06, ibook g4 12 Pbook 12 and 15
- Product: Capturing Creativity (Book) & DVD set.
- Mark at WEVA
- Tips and Techniques – with Brian and Charlie
- Encoding video – CODECs and wrappers and failsafe mode in BIOS-what it does & why you need it.
- TAKE 20 – with Brian and Charlie
- Four Fifty Two – Gabe Morin from Salt Lake City, Utah
- Viewfinder – with Matt and Mark
- The personal joy of making video.
View the Transcript
Encoding Video, Code Cs and Wrappers
Mark Montgomery: Hi, I'm Mark Montgomery and right now we have a special guest, our first special guest on a vidcast, it's Amie Hoffner from Primera.
Amie, thanks for being here, and welcome.
Amie Hoffner: Thanks for having me.
Mark Montgomery: Tell us about this product that you already showed us and given us a preview earlier. And tell us who’s going to benefit from this particular product.
Amie Hoffner: Sure, this is a Bravo SE disc publisher, and we just introduced this September 6.
So, the product is designed to burn and print CDs and DVDs. So, it’s designed for small video production studios, maybe in a film industry if you’re doing some dailies , and we’re also looking at a couple of options for audio independent musicians. And so the gamet is really wide, but for the video it’s a primarily for small studios and independent videographers.
Mark Montgomery: That’s great. How many discs can you handle on this machine?
Amie Hoffner: Sure. This one here is 20 disc capacity. So, when you look at it, it will take discs from the input, then for entrance for drive to burn them, and then inject prints directly on the surface of the discs, so you don’t have to worry about a sticky label, and then drag some off to finish bin.
It’s both Mac and PC compatible.
Mark Montgomery: Great. And did you mention the price or…?
Amie Hoffner: I didn’t. But this is a new system at us at a low price, so we’re looking for a $1499 MSRP. So we estimate it’s true price will be between 12 and 13 000 dollars.
Mark Montgomery:So, very obtainable for who you’re shooting for …
Amie Hoffner: Yeah, exactly. We sell several systems in the market, and the next jump up from this is our Bravo 2 publisher. This is about half the price, so really it is designed for companies and individuals who couldn’t afford a Bravo 2 at about a $2000 price point, but still had the need to burn and print multiple discs.
Mark Montgomery: That’s great. Speaking of discs, why don’t you tell us about the media?
Amie Hoffner: Yeah, we just started with using a new disc that was introduced about 3 weeks ago, called the Watershield Surface disc. We sell them as TuffCoat with Watershield. They’ve made by Taiyo Yuden, and inject printing, typically when you’re printing on an interprinted services, you’ll see water runner, spillage.
So, if you’ve spilled some coffee or decided to take the disc with you in the shower, for some unforeseen reason, you would have ink everywhere. And what we see here is that you will have a waterproof disc with a glossy finish, this is before, and this is after.
Mark Montgomery: That’s great.
So, check this out, this will be obviously on your website, coming out real soon, and we’re excited about this product too, we think it hits kind of our readership .
And we want to thank you, Amie, for stopping by and giving us a preview.
Amie Hoffner: Thanks for having me.
Mark Montgomery: Thank you.
Brian Peterson: Hi, I’m Brian Peterson.
Charlie Fulton: And I’m Charlie Fulton.
Brian Peterson: And this is Tips and Techniques, and we’ve really got mostly tips. And a little bit of, kind of debabelizing. We’re going to work.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, yeah.
Brian Peterson: Wouldn’t you say?
Charlie Fulton: Definitely.
Brian Peterson: All right. So, two things we’re going to cover today are a little bit about the mystique around encoding, and some of the verbiage that gets really grey, quickly.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: And frankly, it’s confusing to even professionals. So, if you find that we start tripping over our tongues, you’ll know that it’s, we’re not just kidding here.
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: The other thing is, why don’t we talk real briefly on earlier cast? How to set up your new system, that you just built, maybe for the first time, do in a way where you know you’re going to be safe.
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: Actually, why don’t we start with that? Since we short shifted it last time, let’s start going.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, okay. So, basically, we got a letter from someone who was whining a, due the whole story, on building a system, and maybe we didn’t arm people with enough information what happens when something goes horribly wrong.
And one way to, if not, if something’s not happening correctly, is to go into the bias settings. Like, if you’re…
Brian Peterson: So, let’s talk that through. How does somebody do that? They turn on the computer, and then they what?
Charlie Fulton: It’s usually holding down the Delete key. But sometimes it’s F2, or sometimes it’s Escape… it depends upon your computer.
Brian Peterson: Right, but you can find that note. Usually at the lower left of the screen, it will say, Hit the Delete to enter setup,
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: Or something along those lines.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, Setup. And what it is, is basically, it will give you the main options that make your computer actually get started. So, if you’re having trouble getting into Windows, or Windows isn’t installing, installation is crashing, these are some of the things to check first.
And one of the options will be called, in most biases it’s called Load Fail Safe Settings. So what these are, are very conservative settings that work for the most part on any hardware that you might have installed on your system.
So if something is going wrong, that’s where I’d check first.
The opposite of that is that theirs is Load Optimize Settings. So, these are some of the more tweaked up settings. They’re still pretty safe, though. So if you wanted to get really hot riding into your system, you would start with those settings and then build up from there.
And what we’re talking about here is, changing RAM timings, or overclocking your processor.
Brian Peterson: (laughs)
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. Brian has overclocked his, but I don’t do that.
So, you know, if there’s a lot of places to tweak on a new computer system, and these will help get you started, get you to where you should be, letting you install Windows, or, you know, Linux, I guess. You can do that.
Brian Peterson: You can do that too. It’s a little different than Safe Mode, is it?
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: This is even a level below the software.
Charlie Fulton: Below Safe Mode, right. But then, Safe Mode does bear mentioning. If you’re having trouble starting Windows, you’ve operated Windows successfully before, but you didn’t change anything in the hardware, if you hit F5 when Windows is just first starting, then it will go into Safe Mode.
So, it will operate more slowly, but it will be compatible with everything else in your system. So that would be where you can pull out some offending driver that messed something up. Or take out a piece of software that’s just doing horrible things to your system.
Brian Peterson: And that’s usually what it is, is that offending driver, and it’s really hard to know just for what that driver is, so you’ve kind of backed yourself into this really basic startup position.
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: And then you start slowly adding drivers and once you finally do that. In fact, there is a mode within the Safe Mode that allows you to check load of each driver.
Charlie Fulton: Right. So you make a log file.
Brian Peterson: It makes a log file, and it’s incredibly time consuming to load with, you know, just one more driver each time, but at least it’s an ensured way of finding where that offensive driver is.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: And we won’t name names, but I think both you and I know some offending drivers out there.
Charlie Fulton: We do, yeah.
Brian Peterson: So, anyway, so the two tips, you just mentioned F5 on startup to get you into Safe Mode, that’s almost, that’s a constant pretty much amongst all systems, at least, obviously for-
Charlie Fulton: For Windows, yeah. Definitely.
Brian Peterson: And the Fail Safe Mode. So two really important tips if you’re building your own system, and a lot of our readers are. In fact, well over 40% of all of our readers, and I’m assuming even much more so our viewers build their own systems.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: And if you’re just getting into it, this is a way to start and not be too afraid.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, definitely.
Brian Peterson: So, all right. Very good. I’m glad we had a little bit more time for that.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: Now, let’s go into codec conundrum. You know, this is something that I actually have learnt not too long ago. And that there’s a difference between the container, or what’s called the wrapper, and the actual codec itself.
Right. And so, I think you and I are kind of come up with handy metaphors for this. And I think we landed on a solid ones.
Charlie Fulton: I think we did.
Brian Peterson: So, you want to throw out the first one?
Charlie Fulton: Well, to explain a wrapper, the basic idea, and we’re hanging out with wrappers, there’s like, the AVI files, which you could have several different types of codecs, within the AVI file.
Brian Peterson: So, a wrapper is the AVI file?
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: And Quicktime movie?
Charlie Fulton: And Quicktime movie, yeah.
Brian Peterson: Uhm, what else do we have? Let’s see. We’ve got Flash.
Charlie Fulton: Flash.
Brian Peterson: These are wrappers.
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: So, a wrapper does what?
Charlie Fulton: It’s basically a container. So, our metaphor that we came up with is the cargo bay of the space shuttle. So if you had, if you’re sending up the space shuttle with nothing in it, then you’re just joyriding. You always send up a space shuttle with a purpose.
Brian Peterson: Right. So the space shuttle being the wrapper?
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: And what goes in to the cargo bay, say, communication satellite, being the codec.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: Space shuttle – wrapper, satellite – codec.
Charlie Fulton: Exactly.
Brian Peterson: I hope this one holds up for a while.
Charlie Fulton: It should, yeah, we’re thinking it will.
Brian Peterson: But for an angle it leaves you further than that. So, you know, you get the space shuttle up, you get it in orbit, open the bay doors, the codec comes out and decompresses itself, you know.
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: Solar panels come out, does this thing, starts communicating, and in this decompressing or compressing usually, in case of video, very frequently.
Charlie Fulton: Exactly.
Brian Peterson: So, that’s, I think, our standing metaphor. We’re going to work with that.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, definitely.
Brian Peterson: So, these are the majors, AVI. Quicktime and Flash are certainly others. But I guess we’re confused about the codecs.
Charlie Fulton: Right. And there are a lot of codecs to choose from.
Brian Peterson: First of all, what is a codec?
Charlie Fulton: A codec is basically just an easy way to, well, it’s a standardized way, really, to pack video or audio or anything, really, into a standardized format that’s smaller.
So what it’s usually doing is compressing a piece of video in a certain way. But in a uniform way, so that when you decompress it, you always get the result that you expect.
Brian Peterson: Okay. And we said that it’s really a smooshing together a mashup of two words. Compression and decompression. Co – compression, and decompression – dec – codec. So, that’s all what it really stands for.
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: All right. So, let’s get into some types of codecs that people might have run into a while ago in AVI.
So, for many of us, who have been producing videos for a little bit of time, we had to be faced with selecting, sometimes, unsounding names for these compression utilities, or codecs.
Sorenson, -
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: Let’s see, a few others…
Charlie Fulton: Cinepak, Indeo, Microsoft video 1, and now that’s broadening into codecs that we would use more often, say, dv, mjpeg, mpeg 2, mpeg 4, Hi264, onto, and there’s a lot more.
So, it’s basically, we can really put these down into two different subcategories. You’ve got your acquisition codecs which would be, say, dv, avchd, hdv.
And then the distribution codecs, like h.264, mpeg 2, mpeg 4.
Brian Peterson: Now, we’re really shortening this list. Actually, if we went online and found many different grids, and it really compasses some of them, but we’re talking hundreds of different codecs.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: And the extension alphabet soup is incredible.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: Many of them, in fact most of them, we haven’t heard of either. So, a lot to choose from. So, these are very, very, generic, broad and popular ones we’re referring to here.
But the mpeg 2, let’s talk about that for a moment. Because mpeg 2 is becoming a very robust codec that has many variances in about itself.
Charlie Fulton: Right, definitely. Mpeg 2 is very know worthy that it’s the standard for DVD, satellite companies use it, dish work net and TV both are mpeg 2 based, in how they’re transmitting video. And there’s certainly others. MicroMV from the past, they use the mpeg2 compression.
So, it got popular because it’s pretty efficient, and everybody uses it.
Brian Peterson: Now, where would people have the opportunity to actually dig into details? So, once you’ve selected the codec, normally you’re presented with variety of different parameters and options. Let’s talk about maybe, say, two of the big options. Bit rate certainly being one of those.
Charlie Fulton: Bit rate, yeah. The higher the bit rate you use, the higher quality you’re going to get out of codec. It you use a lower bit rate, then the quality will be severely compromised.
Brian Peterson: For a bigger file, and again, this is a constant give or take that we all get to deal with.
Charlie Fulton: Exactly. And you have to go into lower bit rates if you’re, say, trying to put 4h movie onto a single DVD. Then your bit rate will become pretty low.
Brian Peterson: Pretty low. And, or, if you’re trying to get it out online and you know that you’re going to have people who will be viewing it at slower or less than high speed bandwidth provider.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: So, bit rate is one. What’s another?
Charlie Fulton: Uh, let’s see. There are some various quality settings, and if you turn up the quality settings that you usually means that there’s more suppressive power needed to actually do the compression. So, if you’re on a deadline, the quality will probably come down. Yeah.
But if you’ve got all night to run a render job, then push it up. You’ll get better results out of it.
Brian Peterson: All right. So, that’s going to be part one of our two parts look at encoding, and codecs, so we just wanted to make, I think, very clear distinction between what’s a wrapper, and what’s a codec.
I think we’ll have to start digging in to some other details about how to use settings to really tweak your video to make it look it’s very best.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: So, join us next week
Mark Montgomery: Hi, I'm Mark Montgomery and right now we have a special guest, our first special guest on a vidcast, it's Amie Hoffner from Primera.
Amie, thanks for being here, and welcome.
Amie Hoffner: Thanks for having me.
Mark Montgomery: Tell us about this product that you already showed us and given us a preview earlier. And tell us who’s going to benefit from this particular product.
Amie Hoffner: Sure, this is a Bravo SE disc publisher, and we just introduced this September 6.
So, the product is designed to burn and print CDs and DVDs. So, it’s designed for small video production studios, maybe in a film industry if you’re doing some dailies , and we’re also looking at a couple of options for audio independent musicians. And so the gamet is really wide, but for the video it’s a primarily for small studios and independent videographers.
Mark Montgomery: That’s great. How many discs can you handle on this machine?
Amie Hoffner: Sure. This one here is 20 disc capacity. So, when you look at it, it will take discs from the input, then for entrance for drive to burn them, and then inject prints directly on the surface of the discs, so you don’t have to worry about a sticky label, and then drag some off to finish bin.
It’s both Mac and PC compatible.
Mark Montgomery: Great. And did you mention the price or…?
Amie Hoffner: I didn’t. But this is a new system at us at a low price, so we’re looking for a $1499 MSRP. So we estimate it’s true price will be between 12 and 13 000 dollars.
Mark Montgomery:So, very obtainable for who you’re shooting for …
Amie Hoffner: Yeah, exactly. We sell several systems in the market, and the next jump up from this is our Bravo 2 publisher. This is about half the price, so really it is designed for companies and individuals who couldn’t afford a Bravo 2 at about a $2000 price point, but still had the need to burn and print multiple discs.
Mark Montgomery: That’s great. Speaking of discs, why don’t you tell us about the media?
Amie Hoffner: Yeah, we just started with using a new disc that was introduced about 3 weeks ago, called the Watershield Surface disc. We sell them as TuffCoat with Watershield. They’ve made by Taiyo Yuden, and inject printing, typically when you’re printing on an interprinted services, you’ll see water runner, spillage.
So, if you’ve spilled some coffee or decided to take the disc with you in the shower, for some unforeseen reason, you would have ink everywhere. And what we see here is that you will have a waterproof disc with a glossy finish, this is before, and this is after.
Mark Montgomery: That’s great.
So, check this out, this will be obviously on your website, coming out real soon, and we’re excited about this product too, we think it hits kind of our readership .
And we want to thank you, Amie, for stopping by and giving us a preview.
Amie Hoffner: Thanks for having me.
Mark Montgomery: Thank you.
Brian Peterson: Hi, I’m Brian Peterson.
Charlie Fulton: And I’m Charlie Fulton.
Brian Peterson: And this is Tips and Techniques, and we’ve really got mostly tips. And a little bit of, kind of debabelizing. We’re going to work.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, yeah.
Brian Peterson: Wouldn’t you say?
Charlie Fulton: Definitely.
Brian Peterson: All right. So, two things we’re going to cover today are a little bit about the mystique around encoding, and some of the verbiage that gets really grey, quickly.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: And frankly, it’s confusing to even professionals. So, if you find that we start tripping over our tongues, you’ll know that it’s, we’re not just kidding here.
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: The other thing is, why don’t we talk real briefly on earlier cast? How to set up your new system, that you just built, maybe for the first time, do in a way where you know you’re going to be safe.
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: Actually, why don’t we start with that? Since we short shifted it last time, let’s start going.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, okay. So, basically, we got a letter from someone who was whining a, due the whole story, on building a system, and maybe we didn’t arm people with enough information what happens when something goes horribly wrong.
And one way to, if not, if something’s not happening correctly, is to go into the bias settings. Like, if you’re…
Brian Peterson: So, let’s talk that through. How does somebody do that? They turn on the computer, and then they what?
Charlie Fulton: It’s usually holding down the Delete key. But sometimes it’s F2, or sometimes it’s Escape… it depends upon your computer.
Brian Peterson: Right, but you can find that note. Usually at the lower left of the screen, it will say, Hit the Delete to enter setup,
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: Or something along those lines.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, Setup. And what it is, is basically, it will give you the main options that make your computer actually get started. So, if you’re having trouble getting into Windows, or Windows isn’t installing, installation is crashing, these are some of the things to check first.
And one of the options will be called, in most biases it’s called Load Fail Safe Settings. So what these are, are very conservative settings that work for the most part on any hardware that you might have installed on your system.
So if something is going wrong, that’s where I’d check first.
The opposite of that is that theirs is Load Optimize Settings. So, these are some of the more tweaked up settings. They’re still pretty safe, though. So if you wanted to get really hot riding into your system, you would start with those settings and then build up from there.
And what we’re talking about here is, changing RAM timings, or overclocking your processor.
Brian Peterson: (laughs)
Charlie Fulton: Yeah. Brian has overclocked his, but I don’t do that.
So, you know, if there’s a lot of places to tweak on a new computer system, and these will help get you started, get you to where you should be, letting you install Windows, or, you know, Linux, I guess. You can do that.
Brian Peterson: You can do that too. It’s a little different than Safe Mode, is it?
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: This is even a level below the software.
Charlie Fulton: Below Safe Mode, right. But then, Safe Mode does bear mentioning. If you’re having trouble starting Windows, you’ve operated Windows successfully before, but you didn’t change anything in the hardware, if you hit F5 when Windows is just first starting, then it will go into Safe Mode.
So, it will operate more slowly, but it will be compatible with everything else in your system. So that would be where you can pull out some offending driver that messed something up. Or take out a piece of software that’s just doing horrible things to your system.
Brian Peterson: And that’s usually what it is, is that offending driver, and it’s really hard to know just for what that driver is, so you’ve kind of backed yourself into this really basic startup position.
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: And then you start slowly adding drivers and once you finally do that. In fact, there is a mode within the Safe Mode that allows you to check load of each driver.
Charlie Fulton: Right. So you make a log file.
Brian Peterson: It makes a log file, and it’s incredibly time consuming to load with, you know, just one more driver each time, but at least it’s an ensured way of finding where that offensive driver is.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: And we won’t name names, but I think both you and I know some offending drivers out there.
Charlie Fulton: We do, yeah.
Brian Peterson: So, anyway, so the two tips, you just mentioned F5 on startup to get you into Safe Mode, that’s almost, that’s a constant pretty much amongst all systems, at least, obviously for-
Charlie Fulton: For Windows, yeah. Definitely.
Brian Peterson: And the Fail Safe Mode. So two really important tips if you’re building your own system, and a lot of our readers are. In fact, well over 40% of all of our readers, and I’m assuming even much more so our viewers build their own systems.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: And if you’re just getting into it, this is a way to start and not be too afraid.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, definitely.
Brian Peterson: So, all right. Very good. I’m glad we had a little bit more time for that.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: Now, let’s go into codec conundrum. You know, this is something that I actually have learnt not too long ago. And that there’s a difference between the container, or what’s called the wrapper, and the actual codec itself.
Right. And so, I think you and I are kind of come up with handy metaphors for this. And I think we landed on a solid ones.
Charlie Fulton: I think we did.
Brian Peterson: So, you want to throw out the first one?
Charlie Fulton: Well, to explain a wrapper, the basic idea, and we’re hanging out with wrappers, there’s like, the AVI files, which you could have several different types of codecs, within the AVI file.
Brian Peterson: So, a wrapper is the AVI file?
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: And Quicktime movie?
Charlie Fulton: And Quicktime movie, yeah.
Brian Peterson: Uhm, what else do we have? Let’s see. We’ve got Flash.
Charlie Fulton: Flash.
Brian Peterson: These are wrappers.
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: So, a wrapper does what?
Charlie Fulton: It’s basically a container. So, our metaphor that we came up with is the cargo bay of the space shuttle. So if you had, if you’re sending up the space shuttle with nothing in it, then you’re just joyriding. You always send up a space shuttle with a purpose.
Brian Peterson: Right. So the space shuttle being the wrapper?
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: And what goes in to the cargo bay, say, communication satellite, being the codec.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: Space shuttle – wrapper, satellite – codec.
Charlie Fulton: Exactly.
Brian Peterson: I hope this one holds up for a while.
Charlie Fulton: It should, yeah, we’re thinking it will.
Brian Peterson: But for an angle it leaves you further than that. So, you know, you get the space shuttle up, you get it in orbit, open the bay doors, the codec comes out and decompresses itself, you know.
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: Solar panels come out, does this thing, starts communicating, and in this decompressing or compressing usually, in case of video, very frequently.
Charlie Fulton: Exactly.
Brian Peterson: So, that’s, I think, our standing metaphor. We’re going to work with that.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah, definitely.
Brian Peterson: So, these are the majors, AVI. Quicktime and Flash are certainly others. But I guess we’re confused about the codecs.
Charlie Fulton: Right. And there are a lot of codecs to choose from.
Brian Peterson: First of all, what is a codec?
Charlie Fulton: A codec is basically just an easy way to, well, it’s a standardized way, really, to pack video or audio or anything, really, into a standardized format that’s smaller.
So what it’s usually doing is compressing a piece of video in a certain way. But in a uniform way, so that when you decompress it, you always get the result that you expect.
Brian Peterson: Okay. And we said that it’s really a smooshing together a mashup of two words. Compression and decompression. Co – compression, and decompression – dec – codec. So, that’s all what it really stands for.
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: All right. So, let’s get into some types of codecs that people might have run into a while ago in AVI.
So, for many of us, who have been producing videos for a little bit of time, we had to be faced with selecting, sometimes, unsounding names for these compression utilities, or codecs.
Sorenson, -
Charlie Fulton: Right.
Brian Peterson: Let’s see, a few others…
Charlie Fulton: Cinepak, Indeo, Microsoft video 1, and now that’s broadening into codecs that we would use more often, say, dv, mjpeg, mpeg 2, mpeg 4, Hi264, onto, and there’s a lot more.
So, it’s basically, we can really put these down into two different subcategories. You’ve got your acquisition codecs which would be, say, dv, avchd, hdv.
And then the distribution codecs, like h.264, mpeg 2, mpeg 4.
Brian Peterson: Now, we’re really shortening this list. Actually, if we went online and found many different grids, and it really compasses some of them, but we’re talking hundreds of different codecs.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: And the extension alphabet soup is incredible.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: Many of them, in fact most of them, we haven’t heard of either. So, a lot to choose from. So, these are very, very, generic, broad and popular ones we’re referring to here.
But the mpeg 2, let’s talk about that for a moment. Because mpeg 2 is becoming a very robust codec that has many variances in about itself.
Charlie Fulton: Right, definitely. Mpeg 2 is very know worthy that it’s the standard for DVD, satellite companies use it, dish work net and TV both are mpeg 2 based, in how they’re transmitting video. And there’s certainly others. MicroMV from the past, they use the mpeg2 compression.
So, it got popular because it’s pretty efficient, and everybody uses it.
Brian Peterson: Now, where would people have the opportunity to actually dig into details? So, once you’ve selected the codec, normally you’re presented with variety of different parameters and options. Let’s talk about maybe, say, two of the big options. Bit rate certainly being one of those.
Charlie Fulton: Bit rate, yeah. The higher the bit rate you use, the higher quality you’re going to get out of codec. It you use a lower bit rate, then the quality will be severely compromised.
Brian Peterson: For a bigger file, and again, this is a constant give or take that we all get to deal with.
Charlie Fulton: Exactly. And you have to go into lower bit rates if you’re, say, trying to put 4h movie onto a single DVD. Then your bit rate will become pretty low.
Brian Peterson: Pretty low. And, or, if you’re trying to get it out online and you know that you’re going to have people who will be viewing it at slower or less than high speed bandwidth provider.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: So, bit rate is one. What’s another?
Charlie Fulton: Uh, let’s see. There are some various quality settings, and if you turn up the quality settings that you usually means that there’s more suppressive power needed to actually do the compression. So, if you’re on a deadline, the quality will probably come down. Yeah.
But if you’ve got all night to run a render job, then push it up. You’ll get better results out of it.
Brian Peterson: All right. So, that’s going to be part one of our two parts look at encoding, and codecs, so we just wanted to make, I think, very clear distinction between what’s a wrapper, and what’s a codec.
I think we’ll have to start digging in to some other details about how to use settings to really tweak your video to make it look it’s very best.
Charlie Fulton: Yeah.
Brian Peterson: So, join us next week
