Hey guys,
this should be an easy one. Is there or what is the difference between exporting directly H.264 and going the other way around - Quicktime/H.246
Leaving aside the container format is different (mp4 vs mov) is there an actual compression difference? Set both to 100% bit rate settings gave me slightly different file size results in favor of the mp4 container. I was just wondering…
Very informative. Thanks, I am aware of that article. Still does not answer the question. There is obviously some difference, considering the file size for starters…
Say if Vimeo needs “h264” compression. Which way would you go?
h.264 is the standard, QT h.264 is an implementation of that standard, as is x.264 etc. IIRC
The answer is trial and error. Although I’ve always found QT h.264 very good, I think the biggest deal is actually not the container format (i.e. mp4 / QT etc.) or the implementation of the codec, but the program doing the compression.
The best compressor can be found out by trial and error. (I’ve been using Compressor for Mac for years… if it ain’t broke don’t fix it). What I would say for interframe codecs in general though is that a 2-pass VBR encode (and data allocation) almost always gives much better results at a given data rate.
That doesn’t happen when you export h.264 from After Effects.
By the way I had soft rejection of first few uploads when started to upload footages encoded into direct H.264 option (MP4) from Adobe Premier two weeks ago so I had to re-encode into Quicktime H.264 (Mov) and re-upload.
So it looks like no question when submitting here.