Speaking of pain, so glad you moved on from QT Player conversions. Batch processing rules!

I use MPEG Streamclip (http://squared5.com) daily. It’s free, for Mac & Windows, has very powerful pre-processing (some of the fancy features that Compressor has), is batchable, and is very efficient.

I can see why VJs would love Stomp, though – adding color/blur/etc. at the final encode stage saves a lot of rendering. If Stomp could do decent watermarking (the others blow at it), I might give it a shake.

Haven’t had too many problems with H.264; I like not having to have, well, a huge hard drive just for loops. But now I’m finding performance is more important, and drives just keep getting bigger!

I sometimes need to use the “dumb codecs” as I call them – dumb means low CPU overhead, which means higher performance for things like Keynote and ProPresenter.

I am still new to which way to properly compress something for use in easyworship and so I appreciate any info on the proper way to do it.

That is really cool that they allow that. I have been trying really hard to not “fudge” my conscience by just doing whatever I wanted to as far as re-mastering their files given the explicit statement to not re-master. So I am happy to learn that I can, yet your saying I should use MPEG – 1?

Here are some things that I have learned:
- converting/compressing videos aren’t “supported” by WorshipHouse b/c if something goes wrong and you mess up the video, they (nor the producer) can offer support for that video. However, b/c of their new “My Media” feature on the webstore, you can always re-download a ciip in case you mess one up.
- also, re-compressing video is more for “power users”… a large majority of users do not have issues with h.264. I consider this blog audience to be “power users” or on the road to being ones. that’s why i blogged about it.
- i’m also curious why you would convert anything to QuickTime for playback in EasyWorship, since it’s a PC software. I would guess that MPEG-1 is the way you need to go.

to provide further clarity, here is the email i received from WorshipHouse (and they gave me permission to post this):

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“Thanks for the email. This is an interesting issue / question. We are constantly wanting to do research and provide customers with the best files for what they are using. We have found that 99.9% of people will be absolutely happy with either the MPEG or h.264 files we deliver. We know that some are power users like you and might want something different.

The place this issue at hand crosses into a gray area is that we can’t “support” editing a file and we know that “re-mastering or re-compressing” or whatever may not be editing, but it is done in an editing software and it does actually change the file to be a different one than what the producer knows we are selling. If it is just re-compression I don’t really care because the producer won’t care either. The thing is though when a file is re-compressed it is no longer the file that we have delivered so we can’t “support” that new file because we weren’t the ones that made it. This is fine if the customer understands that but what sometimes happens is that the customer will say “I re-compressed the file and now there is (*instert any number of problems with file here that we don’t know how to fix*) a problem and I need your help fixing.

on a side note: we do know there is a problem on some of our h.264 encodes with ProPresenter and we are working closely withe them on fixing this issue. The issue is more complicated than us just encoding differently because of the episode engine that we use and how they have written the software to read files. They are obviously busy with the new version 4 launch but we are currently waiting for them to process some tests on a new encode of h.264 we have that we think may be the solution for much smoother playback.”
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I hope this helps! Great question!