Handbrake H264 encoder

Well it seems I've been doing it all wrong as usual. I've been uploading large HD movie files to you tube which as I found out is a complete waste of time. It takes age's and you tube doesn't like the language they speak and the results are crappy anyway. After a quick bit of research it seems MP4's encoded with the H264 codec are very popular due to the excellent file compression H264 offers while still giving great picture quality.

I looked around for a program to encode in H264 as my sony editing software does MP4 but has no H264 support. I was having no luck so I asked the smartest I.T. person I know, a fourteen year old school kid who is also my nephew. He of course knew exactly what I needed and had an answer for me straight away. Handbrake. School kids are so smart these days.

away I've done a couple of my HD movies with it and it shrunk a 5 gigabyte file down to 2 gigabytes and the reduction in picture quality is really quite hard to notice. It was also very fast, the 5 gigabyte file took about 20 minutes. It has no editing features but is very simple to use. A kitesurfer could even use it with adult supervision.

handbrake.fr/

Cheers mate! I use Vegas for my editing as well it's a great program. After my sony action cam went to a watery grave I picked up a go pro silver plus and the superior picture quality of the go pro was immediately obvious. Sony had a sale on at the time so I picked up a copy of movie studio platinium at half price as it had the higher definition encoding options I wanted for the go pro stuff. For my personal archives I encode at XAVCS 1080 hence the huge file sizes. I'm a bit obsessive/compulsive on picture quality when it comes to movies. The Handbrake utility lets me shrink these mega files to a more manageable size for uploading without compromising the quality and goes a long way towards making up for my lack of expertise.

For editing straight to you tube then yeah for sure MP4 straight out of vegas is definitely the go. I did one of my you tube movies this way and it was about 800 megs for about 14 minutes on the maximum mp4 setting. The picture quality was ok but not enough for my fussy nature. Another movie of about 15 minutes done on handbrake came in at a bit over 2gb which is still hefty but I think the quality is much better. The Handbrake utility has a slider bar option for quality which was set quite high for this movie. My genius nephew claims he has been able to improve the quality of grainy movies with this feature. That would be a neat trick if it's true!

Here's a couple of my recent efforts courtesy of last weekends cold front. The first movie is mp4 straight out of sony vegas, the second one is a XAVCS HD compressed with handbrake. At low res they look pretty similar but if you bump them both up to 720HD I think you can see the difference.

Thanks again mate. I've seen most of your sailing movies and I love your work. any tips always appreciated.

I'll try it the quality looks great. Thanks

I'll need to check them out when I get home as I've only had a look on my iPad and the quality looks heavily compressed on both of them, That's just youtube doing it's thing. I'm not a fan of youtube and have not used it for a long time so I'm not up to speed with file restrictions, I'm sure it's similar to Vimeo where they re-compress the file you upload to 720p or 1080p unless you have a pro account....So it won't matter how big you file is to start with, It will get crunched by them anyway.

Anyways as for tips....Do what ever you like, it's your vision of what you see, feel or like about what ever it is your filming. Everyone will have there own idea of what's good and bad, My vids have had plenty of good and bad comments....I like the good ones but pay no attention to those that give me bad feedback, If it was easy everyone would be making movies for us to enjoy.

Somethings I've been told and try to do.

1.Have a story to tell.
2.Plan your video...What shots do you need.
3.Quality and quantity is not everything, It's about the content.
4.Different view points and perspectives, The same shot gets old quickly.
5.Keep your shots short, A long shot can really slow the pace of your movie...Unless that's what your after.
6.People, You need characters to keep the story alive.

I'm sure there's heaps of stuff the experts could tell us but it starts to take the fun out of it for me, I like to keep my edits simple and quick as possible as my attention span is too short to edit for anymore then a few hours.

Keep doing them....

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Dezza said...
I can watch both these videos on my iphone5, 2 one is best picture.

But I can't get either one to play on my iPad mini 1. Do I need to get a new ipad? Have tried upgrading to latest IOS version and cleared settings but no good.

Sorry mate I'm not much help with apple stuff. All I know is you need the H264 codec.

evlPanda, I think you tube has had an issue when you played the first one. It's grainy for sure but not as bad as that screenie lol. Minecraft lol mate that's harsh

Thanks for the compliment about the commentary. My language can get a bit blue sometimes but it's always in context I think. It was a hard day as well, it was violently gusty at times and I was pretty shagged. My fanatic ray tends to get my dander up a little as well. sailing it is kind of like having a pet wolf, it's great until you show it any fear, then it eats you.

I've actually had some positive comments about the dialogue that I do in some of my movies. People from overseas like the aussie accent lol.

Thanks for the great advice jh, I'll definitely put your thoughts into practice. Maybe the talking I do in some of my flicks is my thing lol. Mate the over riding message I get from your flicks is a love of the sport and your local spots and a very tight group of locals. For my money that's what makes your stuff good.

The orginal point of the thread was that uploading big high res files isn't necessarily the way to go and that to the best of my knowledge MP4 is best for you tube and H264 seems to be the leading codec at the moment. If you look on the torrent scene h264 seems to have replaced xvid as the codec of choice. Cheers fellas!