I'm absurdly obsessive about image quality, and ALL of the current options make me wince (except when their artifacts and problems are part of the aesthetic of a piece), but I have to say h.264, for me, was a gigantic step up from 3ivx (which had been my pick for best quality), which in turn did indeed produce much better mpeg4 and at smaller file sizes than apple's mpeg4 codec. But in my tests and use, (no, I haven't kept stuff from the initial tests I did, sorry), artifacts were MUCH less of a problem in h.264, which was the first temporal codec that seemed to cure most of the horrible blockiness that even bugs me when I watch a DVD. It does, however, only work well with progressive, field-blended or deinterlaced sources, so I have to do more prep with it.
I also found the x264 flavor of it used by mpeg streamclip and ffmpegx produces better looking video at small file sizes (at least using multipass) than quicktime's h.264, though you have to be careful when you tweak everything to stay compatibnle with ipods, appletv. etc. (there is an excellent overview of all the h.264 levels and compatibility issues on wikipedia),. Had I been stuck with quicktime for web-destined h.264, I'd have given up due to the encoding time alone. There is, sadly, no way around the other issues Andrew mentions: some older machines choke on decoding h.264, and it starts to look really bad when the try to play it back. For me, the high quality on machines that can handle it is just too seductive, so I use it anyway, though I just moved Trace Garden to blip so that it can have a flash version for other folks, and will be moving all of my other vlogs and video stuff there shortly as well. I'm going to try the new 3ivx when I get back home, though. I'd be thrilled if the quality is now comparable to h.264, because having to use flash for the "widely viewable" versions of stuff.... yuk yuk, yuk yuk yuk..(though kudos to blip - their flash encoding is LIGHT years better than YouTube/LiveVideo/etc.) Brook _______________________________________________________ Brook Hinton film/video/audio art www.brookhinton.com <<vlog links are here TRACE GARDEN now viewable in flash on Blip! http://tracegarden.blip.tv ________________________________________________________ [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
