The Ultimate Superheroines Forum

Hello,

I'm guest editing on a project and I'm trying to render it compressed down to a certain size but still retain quality and I'm wondering if any of you producers can help me.

Here is my situation:

- I'm using Adobe Premiere Pro CC
- My video is 1920 x 1080 and is about 40 minutes long
- I need to get it under 1 GB to upload to SHG-Media

Here's where I'm at:

Using Adobe premiere's built-in media encoder, in order to get this video under a gig, I have to set the
Format: H.264 (mp4)
target bitrate: 3 mbps
max bitrage: 300 mbps (didn't seem to effect size so what the heck right)

It looks ok, but I wish I could encode it with the target at least 6 mbps

I tried using handbrake to compress it just to check it would work, and it actually made it larger.

I KNOW there are 40 minute videos on SHG that look HD, so what am I missing???

Any help is greatly appreciated!!

Update: Upon giving it a second look, it actually looks pretty good, so I even though the low target bitrate seems to do weird things when the screen is mostly dark, overall it looks great so I think I'm pretty satisfied with the render. But if anyone has any handy advice I'd still be very interested to hear it.

X265 is much more efficient for encoding HD in smaller files. However, the drawback is that it's not yet supported by a lot of hardware media players. So it's great if you're watching on a PC or Mac, but not so great if you're putting files on a flash drive to watch on a Blu-ray player or games console.

If you are going to upload x265 to SHG-Media, make sure you advise customers they will need to have the correct codec installed. Alternatively, the software media players VLC and MPC-HC both play X265 along with most other formats.

If, however, you're going to stick with H264 (for more compatibility with hardware), I would advise to always do two-pass encoding at a variable bitrate (VBR). It takes longer, but it makes better use of the available file size. The first pass analyzes the data and then the second pass calculates which parts of the file need a high bitrate (such as fast moving action scenes) and which parts can get away with a lower bitrate.

Also, the majority of HD videos in the genre appear to be encoded at 1280x720. This will also give you greater compatibility with tablets and slower computers which may struggle to play 1920x1080 smoothly.

Heroine Addict wrote:X265 is much more efficient for encoding HD in smaller files. However, the drawback is that it's not yet supported by a lot of hardware media players.

Indeed, I had not heard about it until your post, but just read up on it and it sounds very interesting. However I tried encoding the movie in 265 and the encoder was estimating the size would be almost exactly the same as when I did 264, so I guess it depends on the movie you're trying to encode.

Heroine Addict wrote:If you are going to upload x265 to SHG-Media, make sure you advise customers they will need to have the correct codec installed.

Yeah this doesn't seem worth it to me. The last thing I want to do is cause a lot of headaches and make life complicated for people. For us it's no big deal to get a codec, but for some people it's a hassle.

Heroine Addict wrote:If, however, you're going to stick with H264 (for more compatibility with hardware), I would advise to always do two-pass encoding at a variable bitrate (VBR). It takes longer, but it makes better use of the available file size.

This absolutely, I have been doing. It does take longer but I just do it before I go out, eat a meal, or sleep LOL.

Heroine Addict wrote:Also, the majority of HD videos in the genre appear to be encoded at 1280x720. This will also give you greater compatibility with tablets and slower computers which may struggle to play 1920x1080 smoothly.

I had thought about doing this, but I just pulled up the 'get info' on the latest from Rye and TBFE and they are both 1920x1080, so I'm not sure I want to scale down, but maybe I'll do a test.

Thanks for your help!