An Intro to Video Encoding

Posted June 27th, 2011 / By Justin Younger in Resources, Software, Tips

If you are fresh bait in any video related field–whether you are shooting film with a DSLR for fun, rendering your motion graphics video final out for a client, or making a YouTube video explaining how much you love cats–there is always a giant road block in the way known as encoding. This process is never fully exposed information, and I have personally struggled with mastering it. I’m in not going to get to crazy with this, but I will present to you a beginners guide to encoding.

So, let’s talk about what a codec is and what the hell encoding/transcoding/decoding even is to begin with. Your computer cannot easily play back a hundred thousand jpg’s at 30 frames per second with audio just so you can watch the new season of Say Yes to the Dress. So, some very smart people came up with a way to get the file size down to a manageable size and provide a little capsule they could tuck it all in. These capsules are called “wrappers” and the method of coding and compressing/decompressing the video is called the “codec”. For example, you can have a .MOV file wrapper with an h.264 encoding. The wrapper is important for your end use goal, but often times your codec is just as important.

Here are a couple beginner options for encoding to some useful formats. I know that, natively, After Effects will encode to about everything and all compositions can be sent to Adobe Media Encoder, but often times a quicker route would be to render an uncompressed video from After Effects and pass it through these cheap software choices for your final deliverable.

Quicktime (Windows/Mac): http://www.apple.com/quicktime/extending/

Now we are not talking about the super stripped down Quicktime X (someone explain that mess to me), we are talking the actually useful Quicktime 7 Pro. It comes at a great price point of $29.99 and its extremely easy to pump out “.MOV” files. It does a fantastic job at encoding them. I render out quite a few h.264 files in a “.MOV” wrapper and they always seem to be smaller file size and look cleaner than other options.

Media Encoder (Windows/Mac): http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/quickstart/video_encoder.html

If you have Adobe Suite installed on your system, then you have Adobe Media Encoder hiding some where with it. This nifty little tool is expansive and expanding with each new CS update. Harry Frank of GreyMachine offers a great little tutorial on working with it, and its deep integration with Premiere and After Effects (http://www.graymachine.com/2011/03/rendering-ae-projects-with-adobe-media-encoder/)

SUPER (Windows): http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html

SUPER is quite a gem of a program. While looking like your grandmother designed their site and user interface, if she programmed this handy application too, she deserves some serious internet cred. I have often times needed to output some sort of terrible .AVI file and I have found this program to be quite efficient at getting the work done.

So, you have learned a bit, rendered a bit, drank a bit because encoding can be frustrating, and you have your final files ready for the client to review before they ask you to change everything in the next round of revisions. Drink a bit more, and check out these quick tutorials on the best encoding for popular video hosting sites so you can show off your work…

Vimeo:

Youtube:

Chime in if you guys know anything else, or if missed or messed anything up. After all I am still learning this whole process myself. Thanks!

Hey guys! I like to play with 3 dimensions of space and 1 dimension of time, but unlike Einstein, I only make motion art. So I spend most of my time expressing myself in some abstract, visual way, and I have really latched onto Motion Graphics. I am a newbie here in the field, but I have a passion for the work. Feel free to if you are also a newbie or someone just looking into this awesome form of art, I always enjoy helping people out.