Manic compression
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Types of compression
- QuickTime’s Animation codec
- Flash Video
- Adobe Media Encoder
- Compression for iPod
- Conclusion
QuickTime’s Animation codec
When you set the Quality slider in QuickTime to Best, the Animation codec's compression is lossless. The files are much smaller than uncompressed files, but there is no noticeable loss in quality. This is one of the main codecs used in an After Effects workflow, and is great intermediate codec to use when working with DV material. As long as you render this way, you'll never lose quality—although if you're going back to MiniDV tape, you’ll have to render your final results to a DV codec eventually (a good reason to avoid doing this).
Figure 2: QuickTime's Animation codec, set to Best quality, which results in lossless compression.
There are two QuickTime codecs you should absolutely never use, under any circumstances. Those codecs are Cinepak and Video (ironically). The Video codec is a legacy codec in QuickTime, dating back to the early 90s, and is simply not suitable for video (although it must have been at some point). Cinepak is another oldie-but-baddie and was the first codec used for stuffing video onto CD-ROMs. Like the Video codec, it's now obsolete, but is still included in QuickTime for legacy file support.
