QuickTime 7 Required
After hearing so much about the improvements that would be forth coming int he new QuickTime 7 I couldn’t wait to try it out. I wanted to see if the new H.264 codec that has been hyped all over the Internet is actually worth the hype. Well, it is. I decided that this post would be a two for one. I am going to show you the benefits of the new H.264 codec and embarass myself by showing you the “film” I made for my Digital Cinema Essentials class last semester.
Filesize
The thing that got me excited about H.264 first was the promise of reduced file size without reduced quality. To test this claim I rendered out my movie at full resolution, full frame rate, and high quality settings in both H.264 and MPEG 4. The quality of each was identical and flawless. The filsizes were fairly dramatically different. The MPEG 4 version weighed in around 625 MB. The H.264 was a svelt 411 MB. Thats right around two-thirds the filesize for identical quality.
Quality at low settings
Next I rendered it for dialup: 160x120, 6 fps, and a low data rate. The resulting clips are a petite 1.8 MB each. I will let you be the judge of the quality. Each of the followign movies is the complete movie (6:08) but you only need to watch the first few seconds of each to see the difference (if you want ot see teh full thing there is a better version (for boradband) at the end of the post). The MPEG 4 version displays compression artifacts and other defects. The H.264 is still very clean and readable (for the text parts) even at the low resolution.
Parting Thoughts
H.264 is the ral deal. Many people mistakenly believe it is for HD content. It is not. It can display HD content, and I highly recommend that you check out the HD trailers at Apple’s website, but it is a codec for everyday video as well. So in parting I wish to leave with you a glorious H.264 rendering of my “film” with excellent qulaity and not a bad filesize for hte size of movie. I give you Legal Troubles (6:08, 37.1 MB, QuickTime 7 required).