Axe - Metamorphose (2003) 0:30 (USA)

Hey Greg. Thanks for your feed and sharp ears. It is much appreciated.

The codecs and settings that this site have been using were decided upon through an exchange with both Discreet and Sorenson techies and engineers. Both sides were extremely friendly, helpful and insightful, and we can't thank them enough. The codecs and settings were also decided upon with the basic end user in mind.

The current compressions were based on the following criteria:

We wanted our clips to play on installed Quicktimes going back to the first version of 5. It's amazing, even now, how many people still don't have QT6 installed. It's equally amazing how many people have trouble properly upgrading and/or installing plugins, even with the process being pretty much automated now. We decided on 5 as the baseline for these reasons.

For the video codec, we wanted maximum compression that was as lossless as possible, without overwhelming and crashing the end user's CPU (which is easier to do than you might think). The pixin' and deteriation of quality we saw with the spots at a certain other site as it was going under (before is was bought and resurrected quite nicely by a publishing house) was something we didn't want to do. Of course, we couldn't go back to the computer dark ages, for if we did that, the spots would be the size of a postage stamp. Bleh. So for this, we decided to use G3/Pentium III as the baseline for CPU handling.

For audio, the same considerations were applied, but with one notable addition - We wanted maximum fidelity, but wanted the audio to play not only on higher end aftermarket computer speaker systems, but also to play tolerably well on the chintzy built-in speakers still found in many PCs without blowing them out (people tend to get pissy over that sort of thing). I use a similar tactic when producing radio commercials at one of my more favorite studios - Before I approve the final mix, not only do I have it played through their mega-thousand dollar house speaker system, but also played through an old and decidedly cheap pair of Sparkomatic "Sears Special" auto speakers. Also, since some spots in our archive are over 30 years old with a primitive mono source... well, there's only so much one can do with that.

Your notes on MPEG-4 Audio are excellent, and we have looked into improving/switching, but that will still be a little bit down the road. It's amazing how many agencies and educators expect their employees and students to shine with old and/or default computer systems (the economy is partly to blame, as is cheapness and old school ignorance).

But I thank you again. I have preserved your notes and comments, and when that spiffy moment of change occurs, we will definitely use them with deciding the new standards. It's folks like you that help to make this site so darn nifty - Since Adland is a collaborative site where all time and effort is volunteer, and bandwidth and equipment is covered soley through donations (and often that's not enough, so we end up going out of pocket, like we had to do for the Pro edition software currently being used), knowledge is truly more precious than gold.

Cheers,
Clay