Adapter - Another FREE transcoder

I've been busy lately, and part of the reason I've been so busy is clients like to revive long dead projects so they can play them on the latest and greatest outdated video servers at TV stations.

When A client asked for a project that has been planted firmly in the video graveyard several years ago to be converted to "an mpeg two" I eventually got around to it.

Looking around I ran across a transcoder that I hadn't heard of before called Adapter. It's FREE and isn't all that bad for transcoding stuff. Here's the list they provide when they say "Convert anything to anything"

"3g2, 3gp, 4xm, RoQ, ac3, alaw, asf, asf_stream, au, audio_dice, avi, crc, daud, dc1394, s, dv, dv1394, dvd, ea, ffm, film_cpk, flic, flv, gif, h261, h263, h264, idcin, image, image2, image2pipe, imagepipe, ipmovie, m4v, matroska, mjpeg, mmf, mov, mov, mp4, m4a, 3gp, 3g2, mp2, mp3, mp4, mpeg, mpeg1video, mpeg2video, mpegts, mpegvideo, mpjpeg, mulaw, nsv, null, nut, ogg, psp, psxstr, rawvideo, redir, rm, rtp, rtsp, s16be, s16le, s8, sdp, shn, sol, svcd, swf, u16be, u16le, u8, vcd, video4linux, vmd, vob, wav, wc3movie, wsaud, wsvqa, yuv4mpegpipe"

As always, your milage may vary, but it's handy to know about and since it's free it's worth a shot.

Clients don't understand Container Formats

Once again a client asked me for "an avi" of a video. Avi was introduced in 1992 or so by Microsoft and has really been a positive and exciting boon to the pirated movie industry ever since. Aside from that it continues to cause headaches for "video people" and fellow "creatives" like myself.

.mov, .mkv, .avi and others are containers which mean they're like sandwiches, I tell clients. (Did you see that? I began a sentence with a period, hah! Mrs. Roberts was wrong!) Not all sandwiches are good, and asking me for "a quicktime" or "an mov" or "an avi" is like asking me for "a sandwich on white bread". You've specified that you want a sandwich (video file), with white bread (container format) but you have yet to tell me what kind of sandwich you want (codec).

This seems to be the only way to get through to some clients. "You're ordering a sandwich with white bread but I don't know what kind of sandwich you want. PB&J? Mustard and Lettuce? Cheese and Anchovies?" "What do you recommend?" is usually their response. I dunno. What kind of sandwich does the thingy that you're going to play it on ask for? In the manual. Yes, that one, the one you didn't read.

Today I literally said to a particularly ornery client, "I need to know what you want between the bread, otherwise we're going to have to try a bunch and see which works and looks good." See, I'm making a video in an outdated format, using outdated software for a client's outdated hardware. This is the kinda fun that only a college education can provide, kids.

Things like H.264 solve this problem. They're PB&J sandwiches all the time. And something known as a "standard".

The second most oft repeated phrase from me on the phone is "No, I wouldn't recommend a .wmv."

Free Tool for Matroska Files

Matroska files are becoming more and more popular. What is it?

The Matroska Multimedia Container is an open standard free container format, a file format that can hold an unlimited number of video, audio, picture or subtitle tracks inside a single file.[1] It is intended to serve as a universal format for storing common multimedia content, like movies or TV shows. Matroska is similar in concept to other containers like AVI, MP4 or ASF, but is entirely open in specification, with implementations consisting mostly of open source software. Matroska file types are .MKV for video (with subtitles and audio), .MKA for audio-only files and .MKS for subtitles only.

I'm a fan of open standards and in my other life I use Ubuntu a lot for this reason. So if your client asks for an .mkv file or you need to monkey with them MKVToolnix, a FREE app to deal with Matroska files may be of some help.

Random Green Frames

I was working on a small 30sec commercial that someone handed off to me which was mainly graphics and VO when I noticed that every time I rendered it a seemingly random and different each time frame was just full screen green.

Usually QuickTime does this when it can "read" a file or codec or something along those lines. Checking the timeline I saw that the background layer, the only thing to go green in a bad way, was a .mpg, specifically MPEG2 Muxed. Quicktime seemed to have an issue with it either rendering in the timeline or exporting to a QT Movie.

So, I tossed the offending .mpg into QT Player, exported it as a DV stream (this wasn't HD, obviously) imported it into FCP and replaced the old .mpg with it in the timeline and all was well after re-rendering and re-exporting.

The lesson here is despite what Apple and the FCP manual's tell you highly compressed codecs aren't the best thing to work with if there is a lesser compressed choice.

Yes yes, I'm aware of generational lossy-ness...

Episode Pro

Episode Pro (aka Compression Master) was updated to 5.0 today, does much of the same things Compressor does (incl. watermarks, TC burn in & encodes to various formats such as ATSC A/52, H.265 High Pofile [their misspelling on Macupdate]) and only costs $895.00.

If that's too much, there's always the non-pro "Episode" version for $395.00.

Easy Fast Resizing for Transcoding

Lets say you have a video that's 1280x720 but you want to transcode it (using whatever tool you like) to half it's original size. Here's a very fast & simple way to do it: Open it in Quicktime Player, tap Command + I for the info window and Option + Resize the player's window until you see at the bottom of the Get Info window "(Half)".

Option + Resizing the Quicktime Player window resizes it incrementally to nice aspect-ratio-correct sizes. Doing this you'll quickly see that half of your video's original size is 640x360. (I know this is an easy one but imagine if your video's size isn't something so common.)