Thank you to those who responded to the previous question of Codecs!
Ben Waggoner suggestion of Motion JPEG "B" is an excellent solution
supporting
fields, and doesn't force RGB transformation, and only bumped up file
size about
5 megs - instead of hundreds of megs!
I have 2 more questions I hope someone could PLEASE help me with . . .
.
1). I need to open and re-export 210 movies into this Motion JPEG B
(at 90%
quality) and place in a different folder . . . . . is there an
apple script that
could do this - and if so - where could I acquire it?
Just this week I put together a nice wrapper around qt_tools (a command
line QT encoder) so I could run batch compression jobs from an
AppleScript without using QT Player.
A simple AppleScript using QT Player is also trivial... here's one for
you. Open a movie (short sample file for now) in QT Player and export
it with the compression settings you want. Then drop your real movies
onto the script and it will prompt you for a location and export all
the dropped movies using the previous settings.
Just copy/paste the following into Script Editor and save it as an
Application...
-----
on open theseFiles
set theOutFolder to choose folder with prompt "Select an output
folder:"
repeat with thisFile in theseFiles
tell application "QuickTime Player"
set thisFileName to name of (info for thisFile)
open thisFile
with timeout of 60 * 60 seconds
export movie thisFileName to ((theOutFolder as string) &
thisFileName) as QuickTime movie using most recent settings
end timeout
close movie thisFileName
end tell
end repeat
end open
-----
2). I need to export a picture (.pict - or .tif ?) of the first frame
of every movie (105
real time & 105 slow motion qt movie(s) - (to use as a DVD menus) . .
. . is there
an apple script that would allow me to do this - and if so - where
could I acquire it?
Here's a barely modified version of the same script, to export a BMP
(could be another format, this was just off the top of my head). It
uses the original movie's filename but appends ".bmp" to the end. I
almost posted a version which just numbered them sequentially but
realized that would probably be less useful.
---------
on open theseFiles
set theOutFolder to choose folder with prompt "Select an output
folder:"
repeat with thisFile in theseFiles
tell application "QuickTime Player"
set thisFileName to name of (info for thisFile)
open thisFile
with timeout of 60 * 60 seconds
export movie thisFileName to ((theOutFolder as string) &
thisFileName & ".bmp") as BMP
end timeout
close movie thisFileName
end tell
end repeat
end open
---------
Please realize, neither of these scripts have been bullet-proofed; they
do exactly what they claim, but don't check for errors, don't check for
redundant filenames, etc etc... the main catches I can see:
1) Multiple movies with the same filename... don't do that :)
2) If the compression takes more than an hour per movie (that can be
extended)
And, if the movie is interlaced (which it is) how could I get the best
looking (or highest
resolution) picture from it???
Depends what context... if these will be used in an interlaced
environment later then leave them as is. If they won't, then
de-interlace them (which depends on the nature of the source) using an
app with a good deinterlace filter.... QT Player isn't really geared
for that.
These are really tough questions! Could anyone help me on this?
Sure appreciate any suggestions or pointers you might share!
