newbie question-how are QC .mov files so small?

mbira's picture

I'm curious about this. Why is it that I can export a Quicktime movie from QC and it's really small but very good quality.

THen I try and upload that to Vimeo, and it won't accept the file (even though it's a .mov). I then have to convert it and it gets >10X bigger, and then Vimeo accepts it...

What is happening there?

photonal's picture
Re: newbie question-how are QC .mov files so small?

I remember having this issue when I first got into QC. It seems that exporting a movie from QC actually just saves the QC comp in a way that for example QuickTime player (is that how you are opening the exported movie?) can display it; i.e. the graphics are being generated each time you play the exported movie (like opening and viewing the comp in QC) rather than play back of a recorded stream of image data.

toneburst's picture
Re: newbie question-how are QC .mov files so small?

It just embeds the QTZ file inside a .mov. Which means it won't play on a non MacOS machine, an iOS device, or a Mac with an older version of the Quartz Composer framework.

To render the composition to an actual video file, you either need to employ a screen-capture application like ScreenFlow, or iShowU, or use Kineme's Quartz Crystal to render offline. The latter option gives you access to useful features like antialiasing and motion-blur, for slicker-looking renders.

Hope this helps,

a|x

mbira's picture
Re: newbie question-how are QC .mov files so small?

Cool. Adobe media encoder is working well for me for now. I'll check out Quartz Crystal one of these days.