I'm compressing a movie with cleaner 5. Here are my settings (compressing from DV footage):

Quicktime MOV
320x240
compressed with sorenson
bit depth is millions
keyframe every 3 frames
video data rate limited to 113, with a total rate of 191.2
quality is set to 8
audio has othing to do with this but it is set at 44.1, 80kbps mono, mp3

the settigns wizard says i had it set at 7.5fps, i'm wondering if i changed that or not though.

anyway, here's the problem. it looks pretty good (im net streaming it), except when there are superimposed images. The image suddenly gets very large blocks of compression that last longer than the scene w/ the superimposing. Dissolves get a little overcompressed too. I'm guessing this is caused by the color cast that appears because of the lightly superimposed image.

if you want to see what im talking about a link to the video is below, about 3/4 of the way through the video is a 30 second section that gets completely garbled by this problem:

click here

if that link doesnt work it is on the main page of my website, click download on we laugh indoors:

www.testpilot111.com

thanks for the help.

Your video does look good for the bandwith! The easiest way to solve your problem is to make the size smaller ...but you probably don't want to do that. Try playing with the keyframing setting--try no keyframes and then try every 6 or ten frames. Plus, you should be able to reencode your audio using aac/qdesign2 or a better compressor that will afford you more bandwith for video--80 kbps seems high. Finally, if you can get sorenson 3, you could do a 2-pass VBR encoding to keep the quality high where it needs to be.

yea i have amways been happy with cleaner, does a great job generally. I went high on the audio side b/c i'm a stickler for audio, and it honestly doesnt jump the file size to drastically, i tried about five variations. so thats why i went so high - didnt alter it immensely. also file size is not my concern really, honestly im just shooting for under 10mb, its coming out ok. anyway, here's my questions for you:

first off, how would size affect the compression issues? i wouldnt want to shrink it anyway but i'm just curious.

secondly, i thought about messing with the keyframes, but i would have assumed that more keyframes would be better right? my understanding of keyframes is that there is a reference frame and subsuquent frames are changes from that frame until the next keyframe, is that right?

Finally, what does 2 pass VBR enconding do? Is this a way to dictate over the length of the video where keyframes occur? is there a way to do that? That seems it would be ideal.

thanks for the help!

As per audio, I meant to imply that mp3 isn't the best compression for the quality. You can get very nice ac3 encodings in around 35 kps.

As per size, I mean FRAME size, not file size. If you cut your frame in half, there's less information to compress. So you'll get better looking video, even though it's smaller.

Keyframes are a tradeoff. You do understand them corectly. But with video that changes a lot, sometimes it's just better not to have em.

2-pass VBR is a variable bit rate encoding (VBR) that examines the video in one pass (where it decides how to encode it) and encodes it in the second pass. The only consumer program I know of that lets you set compression 'keyframes' is Apple's compressor in conjunction with FCP. Others may exist. I haven't played around with it too much because it's very time consuming and FCP does it automatically when you export through compressor. ...plus I preffer sorenson 3 vbr and you can't do that through cleaner.

great, thanks for the advice joren, i'll see what i can do.