For that past two years, I've been learning to appreciate H.264, or MPEG-4 AVC. For DV videos that I want to distribute on the web or via podcast, I get 50-to-1 compression while retaining a very sharp picture. Here are some examples.
The painful part of this very high quality, very small file magic is the time it takes to render. It's like watching paint dry (we're talking hours for anything over a few minutes, even on a dual core machine). And that's for SD. To make videos look "better than YouTube", you only need to create something in h.264 with a datarate 800kbps and a window footprint of 512x384 (for 4:3) or 640x360 (for 16:9), but still, a major part of the processes is the compression step.
I am hesitant to edit materials in HD, since I fear a 4x time requirement. So, now the rumor:
A fairly well-known source is saying that later this year, Apple will put a $50 hardware encoder into every machine it sells. Read about it. Cringely sez,
"This will change everything. Soon even the lowliest Mac will be able to effortlessly record in background one or more video signals while the user runs TurboTax on the screen. Macs will become superb DVR machines with TiVo-like functionality yet smaller file sizes than any TiVo box could ever produce. In a YouTube world, the new Macs will be a boon to user-produced video, which will, in turn, promote the H.264 standard. By being able to encode in real time, the new Macs will have that American Idol clip up and running faster than could be done on almost any other machine. Add in Slingbox-like capability to throw your home cable signal around the world and it gets even better. Add faster video performance to the already best-of-league iChat audio/video chat client, and every new Mac becomes a webcam or a video phone."
Thanks to Dan Morken for finding this.
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