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The content here is provided for historical and archival reasons. Much of it is wildly out of date and no longer applicable in our present day. We recommend looking at our newer resources instead.

Media Delivery Notes

Including fundamental concepts involved in digital video.

To learn from these notes, you should do research on many of the terms you may not understand.  Wikipedia and other references are great for research, particularly in teachnical areas such as this.  Wikipedia is almost always accurate, but as always, you should attempt to verify information found on Wikipedia. (As you should with any information source.) Also, use good searching skills to dig up other informative sources.
 
The information here was developerd out of notes from a series of lectures presented by Joe Crawford.  Thus, this information is not always "complete" since the notes were missing a few bit of information.  The information here is still be quite useful, and this page is being continually  improved so that it is more complete and polished.
 

Concepts To Understand In Digital Media

Several concepts important to understanding digital video and audio are listed here. Make sure you understand each of these:

How To Keep High Quality

The golden rule is:  Avoid resampling Changing any of the following are all examples of resampling:

Thus, don't change the above things while working with your footage. From rendering, all the way to your master reel, avoid resampling.  There will of course likely be times when you can't avoid it, but if you minimize resampling, you will maximize quality. Field and temporal (frame rate) resampling, destroys video the most ...except for 3:2 pulldown based stuff. (Or anywhere else with a known formula.) The also applies to sound.  Resampling sound a lot degrades data. If you know you will have to resample, create your source material at a higher than normal resolution.  (At least twice whatever the resolution your plan to publish in.)  Work at high bit depths/resolutions / sample rates etc, using lossless compression or no compression. This way you won't loose significant quality while you work.  If you know you will need to do temporal resampling, (change frame rate or retime video) use a very high frame rate for you initial footage.

Final Output Formats

Common types of output formats: Formats for DVD, in page website video, downloadable video, and lossless/archival video. ****media-delivery-note-a**** (This list must be replaced on this site since it was destroyed in the transition out of concrete5.)

Common Video Standards

(This is just a list.  To find out more about a particular standard, see Wikipedia)

Video For DVDs

A lot of students create poor quality DVD from very good quality source material.  This will happen if the conversion to DVD format is not done correctly.  If you create the DVD according to the specs here you will get the best possible quality. In order to create a DVD the HD content described above must be processed and put into the correct format.  Adobe encore can be used , as can many other DVD authoring programs. Always create your DVD last, after completely finishing your production at its best quality, as a "Master Reel".  Always create your Master Reel first, and then create the DVD from the Master Reel. The process of converting the production into DVD format is called transcoding.  The format to create transcoded to for the DVD is as follows:

You can also include additonal content (such as computer files) in the DVD rom section of the video DVD.

Rendering From 2D or 3D Animation Or Compositing Software

When rendering from software, for best quality and efficient file sizes, you should render to image sequences in certain formats. For regular images, use PNG format.  24 bit for regular "true color" color quality (32 bits with alpha) 0r 48 bit for extra high color quality (64 bit with alpha). Remember that 24 bits per pixel is the same as 8 bits per channel and 48 bits per pixel is the same as 16bits per channel. If you need HDRI level quality, render to OpenEXR, and use PIZ compression which is lossless. (32bits per channel is recommended for best quality with OpenExr, but 16bit floating point can be used if you need to save space.) You can then use other software (ie Adobe Premiere or FFMPEG) to assemble the image sequence into a video file.

Notes On Using Adobe Products

For best quality and compatibility use this format for your master reel:

Encoding To MP4 From Premiere:

You can use smaller bitrates for smaller file size.  These sizes above are huge, and should result in excellent quality. Most of the time your bitrate numbers can be lower.

 

Encoding To DVD Using Encore

If you are using encore CS4, you can import your master reel and properly set the encoding by doing the following:

Working With After Effects

A lot of students use after Effects and ruin their footage because they accidentally resample the footage.  Make sure you have After Effects setup correctly if you are using it. If using After Effects use "Interpret Footage": Premultiplied - Matted on color "black"  (Sssuming your footage came from a program that renders to premultiplied alpha, such as 3dsmax or Maya) Make sure frame rate is 24 frames per second (assuming your source footage is 24fps Creating a Master Reel In After Effects

   
More Detailed Notes About Editing With Premiere: Remember to make a folder for your editing project, in general, I tend to have all my source footage as subfolders of this editing folder. In premiere, create a new project.  Choose a folder and project name, and push ok. Name the default sequence. (Or leave it, because it you can rename it later.) Go to the ‘General’ tab. Adjust the following settings:
Once the new project is created, right click in the upper left panel (the project pane) and choose import. Select footage to use. If you have an image sequence, click on the first image in the sequence and check the “numbered stills” option at the bottom. After importing footage, right click on the footage and change your “interpret footage” properties.  Make sure you set it to 24fps with square pixels and no fields.  (Most of the time you want to turn on “ignore alpha channel” as well.) Drag footage into your timeline.  Afterwards, right click on the footage and turn off frame blending.  (Remember, frame blending damages footage quality.)
Hotkeys:
Alt Mouse Wheel – Zoom
Backslash - Frame all
C – Razor Tool (cut)
V – Move Tool
Page Up,PageDown, Left Arrow, Right Arrow - Navigate Time Slider
To save A final movie, (a “master reel”) use  File > Export > Media

How To Fix Quicktime H264 Gamma, Color Levels, and Washed Out Colors


Quicktime has a bug when showing most h264 video, and it artificially brightens and washes out the color.

If you have encoded h264 video, into either a mov or a mp4 container format, you will likely have encountered this issue.

In order to really understand the problem, you can try watching your animation in several different player applications. In some other software, the colors will actually be fine. Unfortunately, some other software, such as VLC, will show the same problems.

The problem comes from particular settings that probably shouldn’t even exist, and the fact that these settings are generally not correct.

In order to apply the solution below, you need to have Quicktime Pro. (In my opinion: I’m pretty sure that Apple causes this problem on purpose so that you have to buy Quicktime Pro in order to fix the problem. They are a bunch of assholes at Apple.)

Solution:

You can correct the problem in mov files by doing the following:

Open your video in Quicktime pro.
From the menu, choose: Window > Show Movie Properties
In the window that appears, choose “Video Track”, and then click the tab that says “Visual Settings”
In the bottom left you will see several options. Use the transparency dropdown and change the transparency to “Blend”, then set the slider to 100.
Use the same transparency dropdown again and set it to “straight alpha”.
Close the window.
Watch your movie, the color levels should now look correct.
Resave your video. You can save right over the old version, or save to a new filename using the same format.