Compressing

What a boring Sunday. I’d hoped to be outside today, but…
I’m inside at my computer, compressing videos. Such is the glamorous life of a media tinker.
Really, it’s my own fault. I’m doing some subtitling work for an insurance company and the MPEG-1 files they gave me to work with have to be recompressed. This causes a loss of quality, similar to making a photocopy of a photocopy. The details start to blur and it’s not as crisp and perfect as the original.
The client is aware of this; I did a test clip before I agreed to take on the job. In fact, I encouraged them to go back to the original post-production company. But maybe they wanted someone local or maybe I’m just very economical. I got the job.
But even though they think the test clip quality is OK, I’m not happy with it. So I spent Friday afternoon and most of yesterday tweaking and testing the encoding settings in Cleaner.
I even upgraded to Cleaner 6 to get access to 2-pass variable bit rate encoding. But the program is pretty buggy and I’ve had mixed results. Only 70% of the clips processed properly when I batched them overnight.
So I am fighting with Cleaner to get the last few done today. One sailed through with no errors. The other two…fail, fail. I’ve dropped back to Cleaner 5 to see if I can get them to encode without errors.
And that’s why I look so bored. Encoding is a lot of waiting and hoping. The program’s just signalled its completion with a cheery chime, so I’m off to see how it did. With fingers crossed…
[Update: 19:03. The last two clips are done and the CD is burning now. I’m ready to hand this off to the client tomorrow on schedule. Whew.]