I’m a bit of a quality freak. I’m constantly testing tools side by side, trying to determine what produces the highest quality web video (as in, what gives you the best looking video on the web, with the lowest investment of time and money).
At the beginning of August 2008, a new product called DV Kitchen was released. DV Kitchen takes your video and encodes it using the high-definition h.264 codec for the web. That’s nothing new…there are many products that do this. But what makes DV Kitchen unique, among other things, is that they use their own home-grown version of the h.264 codec.
The result (or at least the claim), is that with DV Kitchen and their special h.264 codec, you get the best quality web video possible at the lowest possible file sizes (as compared to competing products).
So I decided to test DV Kitchen out…in a head-to-head competition…against other leading tools that produce h.264 video for the web.
What happened? What were the results? Is DV Kitchen superior, equal or just another ho-hum tool? Well, I made a video of the competition. Click the image below to watch it (if you’re a Firefox user, you’ll need to be using Firefox 3.0 or above to watch this video):
If you’d like to check out DV Kitchen for yourself (which I strongly recommend), you can go here to find out more and even download a free trial.
this tutorial not workin but why ? when checked i got this text
Click to run an activex control on this webpage i did run but no result
It’s a QuickTime video…you need to have the QuickTime plugin installed.
Hi Dave,
thanks for going through all the steps in great detail. But I think you are comparing apples with pears. Have you tried to restrict the data rate to 3600 in the Final Cut/Quicktime exporter?
Had you done that, I assume you would have ended up with exactly the same result as with DV Kitchen. In the Demo, as you point out, you left data rate on automatic(=unrestricted), which of course leads to huge files.
The rename from .mov to .flv should also work just the same. Could you possibly have saved 99 bucks just by clicking the right data rate in the FCP export dialog?
I would much appreciate if you tried that with your same original video and shared the result with us.
Thanks
Jake