MPEG-4 format (18.4mb)
H.624 format (11.4mb)
For presenting my completed soundtrack proposal to the client, I need to be able to compress the video and audio to a smaller size so that it can be sent quickly, and attached to e-mails so the client can see my work, but also not compromise the audio quality which is most important to preserve as it's what I'm providing, but also not spoil the video quality too much also, as this doesn't look greatly professional, and may give the wrong impression to the client on what standard and quality you work to. Ideally, an uncompressed file would be best to present to a client, as this is becoming easier with uploading an unlisted video to Youtube, and sending that link to the client, so the video isn't publically available to view, but can be viewed by the client with the link, and can be uploaded with high quality audio and video too. However, if the client needs your work in a specific format for whatever reason, depending on how they work, I would have to be able to meet their requirements to ensure my chance of confirming the work, and if this envolves compressing the video and audio, I have to know how to do this.
There are many types of files, offering different quality, some focussing of preserving either the audio or the video, or keeping both equally as good as each other, and others for use with specific devices, like compression to a size which can be stored and viewed on an iPad or iPhone which are becoming more commonly used pieces of tech in companies. An example of the iPhone and iPad specific format is H.624, which is heavily compressed for uses on devices, and other apple formats which compress less and close to virtually compressed at all are MPEG-4, which uses the AAC (Adavanced audio coding) encoder which produces better than MP3 quality at a similar rate for the audio, and is therefore a good option for compression when audio is important to preserve. Other possible formats to compress to are .mov, which is QuickTime's preference format, so if the client specifies that they wish to view it in quicktime this would be a foolproof option, .mp4 which is the video and audio equivalent to .mp3 which is just audio, and has degrees of quality but generally won't ruin the sound of a soundtrack and finally .m4v, which is another apple format not massively dissimilar to .mp4, which apple uses as the compression format for it's audio visual products sold through the apple store. All these are viable encoding options, and all will provide varying results, so when I came to encode my project, I decided to try a few of these to see what noticeable changes occur as the file size gets smaller and smaller, and how much I feel I should compromise quality for small size, before it begins to obscure the characteristics of the Foley sounds and music I've created for my piece.
There are different methods of compression when compressing the video files. Firstly, the method I used for my videos was the compressor software for mac, that gave me the option to compress into all the for mentioned formats, so I could see what provided the best results. In this software you select a file type to convert to, and a destination to send the converted file, and load the full quality file into it, to then begin converting. My two video's above are in MPEG-4 format and H.624, with the intention of the MPEG-4 being suitable for viewing in players on mac and PC computers with Windows Media Player or QuickTime which can both play this format, and the H.624 for a portable apple device, or if the MPEG-4 wasn't suitable for some reason, this would be might alternative option. I've noticed after bouncing that in the smaller H.624 does lack the sound clarity of my full quality, and some of the foley sounds appear to be less prominent against the music, whereas the MPEG-4 is far better, and although the quality of the video of both is quite poor, it's still good enough to decide whether the audio and video work together, and the motion of the objects on screen in the visual is still clear, which is all it needs to be for the submission to the client. As my MPEG-4 came in at 18.4mb in size, and the limit for e-mail attachments is roughly 20mb, this should be a fine format to send my video to the client in, and if not I think that rather than using the H.624, I'd rather choose another MPEG like MPEG-2, which saves space by further reducing the video quality, and meaning that to look good it would have to be viewed in a smaller window, and that expanding the window would make it more pixellated, but this is a better compromise to retain the good audio.
My video examples at the top of the page are my 11.4mb H.624 video, and beneath that is the better quality MPEG-4 at 18.4mb, and these demonstrate the changes in quality according to file size. It's worth noting this is a 2 minute clip, and a smaller video clip of 30 seconds to one minute could be encoded at better quality as it is shorter than this, but the MPEG-4 provided good results which I'd be happy to send to a client to demonstrate my work.
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