Sample Encoder Test Clips

Posted By: Ben Waggoner | Apr 22nd @ 10:24 PM

I've been working for what seems like forever on a good 1080p24 film-sourced content with clear rights that can be used for codec testing by the broader community.

Since I've finally realized that a big purpose of a blog is an auxilliary memory for myself, and to have a place to point people towards things I get tired of typing over and over, here's two test clips showing what's available.

Both of these are from a shoot on the Lady Washington shoot a bunch of interepid Microsoft employees and and a hand-picked crew did before my time at the company. It was shot on a mix of 35mm and 1080i. There's also a nice if not incredibly challenging 5.1 orchestral soundtrack with it. Being of a tall ship on the water, it's got lot of good imagery to stress gradient preservation (sky) fine random details (water) and sharp diagonal lines (rigging).

Both of these comps are 960x540 QHD ("Quarter HD") @ 3 Mbps CBR, for relatively easy playback off Silverlight Streaming. I'll get around to doing full-rez encodes and the source clips down the road (we'll see if Microsoft.com lets me host 20 GB of downloads)...

Clip 1: 1080i
This is from 1080i30, obviously. And just as obviously, this one was edited and color-corrected by an actual professional, not me. A good test for HD interlaced compression (note the QHD sample is actually deinterlaced to 540p30). I wouldn't do anything else to it to make it a test clip. The usage rights for the clips are on the final frame.

Clip 2: 1080p24
This is from 35mm film sources. And it was thrown together in a few hours, sans any color correction, by myself (not an editor!) for a rush job to get some DLNA test bitstreams together. There's a thread over at Doom9 discussing what we should do to this to make it a better codec test clip for feature film content.