- Joined
- Jan 8, 2004
- Messages
- 442
- Reaction score
- 15
- Points
- 18
- Location
- Sweden
- Your Mac's Specs
- 2GHz C2D macbook
where do I begin? well i installed QT7 pro on panther. I was very curious about this H.264 codec. so I did some testing, here's what I think.
QT got prettier, and I love this floating controls, a bit DVD player-ish I must say. .AVI playback is much better then in 6, though there is still room for improvement. you still get those green pixels time after time.
still no support for AC3 audio (you need a third party codec for that). a clear improvement in audio playback. can playback a full 6 channel surround, no glitches.
audio and video record is fine, can be handy sometimes, but its still quite amateur-ish.
now about H.264 codec. picture quality is crisp and clear, but HD playback is really stressing the system. I played one of those HD trailers, apple has posted on their website and I em not quite happy about what I saw. there was an obvious frame skipping. I played it on 1GHz eMac with 768 RAM. it made my CPU max out. so everybody who's not on G5 will not be able to enjoy HD encoded with H.264. now I do not know how will it behave on dual G4 or new powerbooks, but those who own eMac, iMac G4, or mac-mini will be disappointed. now don't get me wrong, I em not saying that it sucks, but it really requires a high end system.
now about encoding. it take awfully long time. for the comparison 20 min SD video takes 3 hours for high quality mpeg2 encode on my mac and the same video needs 4 times longer with H.264. and all this in SD, I can only imagine what will happen if you encode HD. the result of encode was quite impressive though, H.264 really delivers what it claims to: high quality and small file.
in the conclusion, QT7 and H.264 are really cool and great, but one will need top of the line hardware to work with it.
UPDATE:
I tried to edit some video in quicktime 7. main difference from previous version is that now you can export several movies simultaneously. selection triangles have become more responsive and accurate. you can disable/enable tracks from movie properties pop-up menu.
QT got prettier, and I love this floating controls, a bit DVD player-ish I must say. .AVI playback is much better then in 6, though there is still room for improvement. you still get those green pixels time after time.
still no support for AC3 audio (you need a third party codec for that). a clear improvement in audio playback. can playback a full 6 channel surround, no glitches.
audio and video record is fine, can be handy sometimes, but its still quite amateur-ish.
now about H.264 codec. picture quality is crisp and clear, but HD playback is really stressing the system. I played one of those HD trailers, apple has posted on their website and I em not quite happy about what I saw. there was an obvious frame skipping. I played it on 1GHz eMac with 768 RAM. it made my CPU max out. so everybody who's not on G5 will not be able to enjoy HD encoded with H.264. now I do not know how will it behave on dual G4 or new powerbooks, but those who own eMac, iMac G4, or mac-mini will be disappointed. now don't get me wrong, I em not saying that it sucks, but it really requires a high end system.
now about encoding. it take awfully long time. for the comparison 20 min SD video takes 3 hours for high quality mpeg2 encode on my mac and the same video needs 4 times longer with H.264. and all this in SD, I can only imagine what will happen if you encode HD. the result of encode was quite impressive though, H.264 really delivers what it claims to: high quality and small file.
in the conclusion, QT7 and H.264 are really cool and great, but one will need top of the line hardware to work with it.
UPDATE:
I tried to edit some video in quicktime 7. main difference from previous version is that now you can export several movies simultaneously. selection triangles have become more responsive and accurate. you can disable/enable tracks from movie properties pop-up menu.