So, I've been making some small movies in FCE and outputting them to Quicktime format. My preferred output resolution is 320x240. I'm using H.264 compression, single pass, Medium quality. But when I do that, it seems that my files come out pretty darned big. For instance, a 4:23 video that I made is 65MB. And that seems consistent across all my videos: I'm "spending" about 14MB / minute of what is only moderate quality video. Considering that I'd like to put these on a mobile device, like an iPhone, that seems pretty hefty in terms of file size. My efforts to output to MPG and AVI via FCE have led to piggy file sizes as well.
The one decent result I got was when I use the MP4 output option in FCE. When I use that output method, I get file sizes that are approximately 20% the size, and yet have no appreciable difference in image quality from the same movie in Quicktime. I find this really weird, considering MP4 (from what I understand) is basically using the Quicktime container format. But I'm not certain that outputting to MP4 makes sense, because I don't know how prevalent the format is, or is likely to become.
Any sage wisdom on the general topic of getting better compression out of FCE, either natively or using third-party conversion utilities (should I look into ffmpeg?) would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Cheers,
-jon-
The one decent result I got was when I use the MP4 output option in FCE. When I use that output method, I get file sizes that are approximately 20% the size, and yet have no appreciable difference in image quality from the same movie in Quicktime. I find this really weird, considering MP4 (from what I understand) is basically using the Quicktime container format. But I'm not certain that outputting to MP4 makes sense, because I don't know how prevalent the format is, or is likely to become.
Any sage wisdom on the general topic of getting better compression out of FCE, either natively or using third-party conversion utilities (should I look into ffmpeg?) would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Cheers,
-jon-