Posts Tagged Compressor
Video Compression Class at Stanford University : by Ben Wagonner
Digital Media Academy News + Events | March 9th, 2009 by Philip Harding
Written By Ben Waggoner
Wow, the year just keeps skipping past; this post has been on my to-do list for a month now. And my video compression classes are approaching at a rapid pace, with signups for Digital Media Academy @ Stanford University already open!
These classes are among the highlights of my year. I never learn faster than when I’m teaching, particularly when I get the great students that attend the sessions. Skill levels vary widely, and the course is designed to accommodate that. But everyone’s got something unique they’re trying to do, whether it’s a supervisor of a high-volume compression department getting up to speed on new formats, or an educator incorporating videos of marine animals into the classroom. And it’s those real-world projects where the rubber meets the road. The focus of the classes is on hands-on art, science, and craft of video compression. It’s all about how to get the best results out of real-world content with real-world workflows, within all the real-world constraints we have to operate under.
When Microsoft was recruiting me back in 2005, one of my top requirements was that I keep on teaching these classes, with full freedom to cover the formats and technologies that matter, even if competitive with our own. It was an easy sell – they understand the value of me understanding everything. And of course, now that VC-1 is a SMPTE standard and Silverlight is getting H.264 support, the era of proprietary media formats is over anyway. So while we’ll certainly spend time with VC-1, WMV, and Silverlight, we’ll also cover MPEG-2, MPEG-4, Flash, DVD, Blu-ray, Ogg Theora, and other formats and players based on class interest.
Class time is roughly split between lectures/demos and hands-on time doing projects. Each student gets their own workstation loaded with the latest and greatest compression software and related tools.
And I really encourage students to bring along some of their own content and projects, particularly one’s they’ve been having trouble with. Nothing beats that kind of variety of real projects to teach the tips and tricks of our craft.
DMA computer training classes offer Stanford Continuing Studies academic credit, and so are generally covered by corporate education benefits.
Stanford University: August 10-14
Mastering Video Compression
This is the one that started it all; 2009 makes it a full decade since the very first 2-day class I did for the Stanford library science department on authoring QuickTime for education . We’ve been doing the current week-long format for eight years now. The program that ran that class evolved into the Digital Media Academy, which now runs a very wide variety of classes. My 9 year old son came along last year to take a great LEGO Robotics course the same week. He and James Clarke (who took the class) really hit it off; the three of us can deliver quite a whirlwind of nerdish intensity.
Since it’s a one week intensive, it works as a destination class; we get people flying in from around the world. On-campus dorm rooms are available (and quite nice; I stay in one), with other lodging options available, and a meal plan.
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Video Compression for Producers and Editors : How Big is It?
Digital Media Academy News + Events | February 19th, 2009 by Philip Harding
Written by Jeff Sobel of the John Lennon Bus
A video producer often needs to be able to estimate the size of a video file before that video has been recorded, imported or exported. Do you need a magic crystal ball to predict how large a video file will be before you hit that Export button? Nope. You just need a 5th grader’s grasp of basic math. Here’s how:
Let’s take the example of exporting a video using Apple’s Compressor which comes standard with Final Cut Studio 2.
The first thing you should know is that digital video is encoded at a certain datarate, commonly called the bitrate. Higher bitrates generally produce better quality video (less “pixelation” or graininess) but will create larger files. You need to be sure that you choose a bitrate that’s high enough to achieve satisfactory quality but not so high that the video can’t be streamed on the web, downloaded in a reasonable amount of time, emailed, or however you intend to get it to your audience. Compressor has presets which are great starting points for making this decision.
The screenshot below shows Compressor’s stock presets for iPod, iPhone, and AppleTV:
You’ll see that there are two different presets for iPod/iPhone. The 1st is “h.264 video @ 600kbps” and the 2nd is “h.264 video @ 1500kbps”. Now, it’s safe to assume that the 2nd preset will produce better quality video, but how big will the files be? Let say we have a 2min long video and we’re hoping to compress it to a small enough filesize to be able to email it. Will the 600kbps setting do that for us? Let’s figure it out.
The 1st thing you need to know is that “600kbps” stands for “600 kilobits per second”. Now, we’re all pretty used to hearing about kilobytes, megabytes, even terabytes. But what’s a kilobit? A bit is the smallest piece of data there is. We represent bit with a lowercase b and byte with an uppercase B. All you need to know is:
There are 8 bits in a byte.
There are 1024 bits in a kilobit.
There are 1024 kilobits in a kilobyte.
There are 1024 kilobytes in a megabyte.
It’s not nearly as complicated as it might seem at first. It’s just like measurements you make in a kitchen. You know, 16oz in a pint, 2 pints in a quart, 4 quarts in a gallon, etc…
So let’s figure out how big our 2min video is going to be after we compress it using the 600kbps preset in Compressor:
600kbps / 8 = 75 kilobytes per second
75KB/s * 60 = 4500 kilobytes per minute
4500KB/m / 1024 = 4.4 megabytes per minute
Our 2min video is going to be about 9megabytes when exported with this preset. Small enough that you might be able to email it.
Now what if we compressed it using the AppleTV preset? That’s a 5mbps bitrate (5 megabits per second) so:
5mbps * 1024 = 5120 kilobits per second
5120kbps / 8 = 640 kilobytes per second
640KB/s * 60 = 38,400KB per minute
38,400KB / 1024 = 37.5 megabytes per minute
At this setting our 2min video will be about 75 megabytes. Much larger. But it’s going to look much better as well, even on an HD TV.
In our next installment we’ll talk about how you can estimate how much disk space you’ll need before capturing or importing your footage from a video camera.
Motion Tips and Tricks by Mark Spencer
Digital Media Academy News + Events | February 17th, 2009 by Mark
I love teaching at DMA – there’s nothing like direct student interaction for communicating concepts and seeing students discover the possibilities of Final Cut Studio and begin to ratchet up their creativity. If you want to experience one of the amazing face to face courses I teach for DMA I suggest you register for the Final Cut Studio Integration course. However, I’m only reaching about 15 students at a time.
I’ve been either a guest or a host on MacBreak Studio, a video podcast that covers tips, tricks, and workflow ideas around Final Cut Studio, for the past year now – my focus is mostly on Motion, but the other hosts, cover all Final Cut Studio related topics. You can see all past episodes on the web here, or you can find them on iTunes, here. Check them out and let me know what you think.
