Quicktime Movie specs for Powerbook

[potatohead]

I need to use PTLE5.2/MBox with a Powerbook G3 or G4 and we are facing tapping fingers when we try to run a QT movie in our session. If we turn the movie offline everything behaves fine, otherwise, it's super slow and basically is unusable. I'm wondering if I'm using a poor codec choice in Cleaner 5 for my QT Movie.

Here are the facts:
1. QT movie was originally loaded on another Mac with an Aurora Fuse card.
2. The QT Movie was converted using Cleaner 5 to: 320X240, Sorenson codec, Datarate=6000kbits/Sec. (which created a movie that QTPlayer says is 377K/sec)
3. The QT Movie is running on a separate drive (Firewire 7200) from the audio (internal drive).

I get the identical problems on either a PBG3 or a Titanium.

Does anyone have any recommendations for good compromise settings for QT movie renders that will work with either MBOXPTLE5.2 (or PTFree, I guess)????

[8trackmac]

I've done some work importing QT movies into PTLE w/ much success (after some initial struggles...). I would bump the QT export quality down. If you have the option of 'low' I would use that. Before you try that, I would put the movie on the same drive as your audio - I don't think there is a need to seperate them. (hmmm...now I'm wondering if there is a playback option in PT itself, under the 'Movie' pull down. i'm not looking at it right now, but you might check that too.) good luck! [img]images/icons/cool.gif[/img]

[Stuart P.]

Well, the datarate is a bit high. 6 megabytes a second is too much for ProTools to handle. Even under the best of circumstances I've only gotten reliable performance with up to 2 megabytes a second. Use quicktime pro instead of cleaner, export as Aurora mjpegA (frame rate will depend on final destination be it film or video) and cap off the rate at about 800 - 1200 KBps. I sincerely hope this helps.
S. [img]images/icons/rolleyes.gif[/img]

[potatohead]

datarate is 6000kbits/sec = approx 500K/sec.

so datarate is not the problem.

Why would I want to use the Aurora MJPEG codec if I'm playing back without a Fuse card (remember this is just on a powerbook)?

Help!!

[Stuart P.]

Whoops, sorry... Didn't have my coffee yet when I wrote that. Not that I'm all that much sharper now.
Well, does this occur with movies made with other codecs? Did you set the movie to view as blocks and at its smallest vid track size? I wish I could help more. [img]images/icons/rolleyes.gif[/img]

[potatohead]

Movietrack=blocks, hid movietrack. Tried Cinepak=same prob.

I'm talking about a session with one empty audio track + vid track. There must be some magic combination of codec+datarate that Digi recommends for something like a TiBook500MHz.

BTW, Quicktime Player has no problem playing these or much bigger movies on the same CPUs.