Thursday, April 29, 2010

Sixteen - is the magic number.

For all of you video geeks out there! I just learned a little something important, and very cool. When exporting .mov files from Final Cut - via - Compressor, occasionally I would get this bizarro vertical green line down the right side of my frame. It was happening infrequently and no matter how I changed the settings, it was still there. Turns out, when you're using the H.264 codec (which I do for most everything), your video's final dimension needs to be divisible by the number 16. Apparently, H.264 encodes in blocks of 16, or something like that. In any event, since I frequently change the dimensions of my final file due to overall file size, or where it's going to be delivered, etc., I just had to incorporate a little math to make it work. And indeed, work it does! Example: A current project is being output at 520 x 390 pixels. This equals 202,800 pixels. Divide by 16 = 12,675. A whole number! God bless Apple forums.