Re: Quicktime movies

From: Tony Schountz (tschount@mesastate.edu)
Date: Thu Oct 07 1999 - 15:38:22 EST


"Steve G. Hilliard" wrote:

> While I'm no expert on imaging or QT, I would suggest converting each to a
> jpeg, since this format presents photos so well, and produces quite
> compact files.  If you have any control over jpeg quality you might want
> to do a trial run at different settings, because jpegs can often be
> compressed at 50% quality and still look good enough for the web.  I
> would think the same would be true for movies.  (I'm surprised it lets you
> produce QT's from tiffs, because they're huge!  Streaming tiffs would take
> a LOT of computing power.  I'd go for a Linux beowulf cluster ;-)

One word of caution for this approach. JPEG is a compression algorithm that
loses pixel information each time a file is saved. Standard TIFF does not use
compression and thus no pixel information is lost. Consequently, TIFF files are
very large compared to JPEG. In the final analysis, TIFF provides a better, but
larger image. If you want to string together images as a QuickTime movie,
compression of each image is not necessary (and may result in image
deterioration) as QuickTime files are compressed when made. On the Mac platform,
the file formats of choice (IMO) for storing still images for incorporation into
a QuickTime movie are PICT and Photoshop native. No pixel information is lost
and when they are incorporated into a QuickTime movie by QuickTime editing
software, the final movie is compressed to minimize file size.

Just my $0.02 worth.

--
Tony Schountz, Ph.D.
Department of Biological Sciences
Mesa State College
mailto:tschount@mesastate.edu



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