Interesting Experiment For You To Try: 720p vs 480p

[Jerry Jones]

This is an experiment anybody can try.

Visit the APPLE Quicktime Web page here:

http://tinyurl.com/8xevp

You'll see a variety of H.264 samples.

- 1080p (1920 x 1080) samples;

- 720p (1280 x 720) samples;

- 480p (848 x 480) samples.

Play them on the screen you have available.

My brother has a Mac and we downloaded a variety of clips.

What really surprised us was the quality of the 480p clips.

They looked surprisingly good even on my brother's 32-inch flat panel.

There's no reason good 480p standard definition video can't look just fine on a flat panel display.

The 720p clips -- as expected -- looked awesome.

The 1080p clips -- not surprisingly -- probably would look very, very good on a higher-resolution display, but since my brother's display features a native resolution of only 1366 x 768 (not high enough to actually see all of the pixels of 1080p material), we couldn't see any difference between the 1080p and the 720p.

But do have a look at those 480p clips.

They're not bad at all.

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Jerry Jones]

By the way, I think 720p is the "sweet spot" format.

- Relatively quick downloads (although slower than 480p);

- Matches up well to a huge number of today's fixed-pixel displays;

- Reasonable file size;

- Can be processed easily by most of today's processors;

- Resolution still high enough to deliver the "WOW" factor.

Jerry Jones

http://www.jonesgroup.net

[Hulk]

I agree with you Jerry. Although 1080p is the "holy grail" of HD it's gonna take a while before we have affordable cameras, editing solutions (fast), delivery, and viewing devices. 720p does seem like a good compromise.

- Mark

[lowlifecat]

i got a few h.264 720P samples going. unfortunatly smartFTP farted.

gonna do FileZilla tonight