video encoding for teh suck
Jul. 23rd, 2006 04:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
zwolWhen fine details of motion in video from your experiment will be gone over frame by frame by undergraduate slave labor research assistants, clever temporal encoding like H.264 (which introduces all sorts of motion artifacts, invisible at normal speed) are no longer a good idea. Conveniently enough, QuickTime container format allows you to just encode each frame as a separate JPEG. But then the file is much bigger, and you can't fit as much video on your DVD as it says on the label.
Just how much you can fit depends strongly on where you put the JPEG quality slider. Ideally I'd like to put it way high up, because DCT artifacts can be just as bad; but empirically speaking, I have to put it down around "medium" to get 60mins of video on one DVD with associated reference material.
Also, it takes nearly as long to encode the video as it does to get the video off the tape and onto the hard drive, i.e. about as long as it would take to play the thing back in realtime. And only at the end of that do you discover whether the file will fit on the DVD; and if you got it wrong, you get to do it all over again.
Just how much you can fit depends strongly on where you put the JPEG quality slider. Ideally I'd like to put it way high up, because DCT artifacts can be just as bad; but empirically speaking, I have to put it down around "medium" to get 60mins of video on one DVD with associated reference material.
Also, it takes nearly as long to encode the video as it does to get the video off the tape and onto the hard drive, i.e. about as long as it would take to play the thing back in realtime. And only at the end of that do you discover whether the file will fit on the DVD; and if you got it wrong, you get to do it all over again.
