Customer Reviews

Compression for Great Video and Audio, Second Edition: Master Tips and Common Sense (DV Expert)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Compression of audio and video has enabled the digital revolution in media that we are all immersed in today, and has been used for many years. Just about all of the audio or video you are exposed to now has been digitized and compressed. Not just what you see or hear on a computer or a mobile phone, but also DVD, cable TV, often even radio. So compression of audio and video is an important and powerful topic, in a way that few people seem to really understand. So a book like Ben Waggoner's Compression for Great Video and Audio has a lot of potential for usefullness and impact.

There are a bewildering array of methods that can be used to compress audio or video, and a range of ways to deliver that content. The wealth of information this book offers on a wide range of topics is its strength, and is enough to make this book attractive to many who are interested in this topic.

And it's organized in a way that will be useful to those both new to the field and those who have some knowledge. Trying to hunt up this information on the internet won't give you what you need, in a reliable way. It's presented here in a more complete and clear way than you'll find by searching.

But as someone once ironically commented, the great thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from. That's where this book has gaps. The big questions in compression often involve difficult choices and tradeoffs. In fact, fundamentally compression is all about difficult choices and tradeoffs - how much bandwidth or storage are you using, how do you allocate it to video or audio, and so on. While there's some good and very general advice, this Second Edition doesn't go far enough in helping users make decisions to complete their projects, such as: What codecs should I use? What bitrate should I use? How should I trade off between bitrate used for video and for audio? While in many cases these decisions may be made by the organization you are part of, or the hardware or software platforms you are using - that will not always be the case.

Further, the treatment of audio is cursory and needs to be significantly enhanced. Again, there is some good information and advice, just not nearly enough of it for a book promises to cover that topic well.

So Compression for Great Video and Audio has lots of good information, and some wise advice. I didn't find much that was wrong (and that's a risk in this field - there is an incredible amount of information that's just wrong in many discussions of compression). That's enough to recommend the book. But there are a lot of gaps, and the title seems to promise much more than the book delivers. This book is worth the price, but it isn't a complete guide to Compression for Great Video and Audio.

As someone who likes to post up video and enjoys mastering audio and video for the web and dvd, i found this book to be a greater refresher and i learned quite a bit as well.

the book covers how to do everything, compression, output, mastering, etc.

you'll learn what settings are what and how to fix what needs to be fixed.

The book mostly focuses on video, once you read this you'll just "know" video kinda like Neo from Matrix just "knew" kung-fu.

Sadly this book doesn't cover as much on the audio department, but it makes up for it by covering it and being authoritative with the video.

highly recommended book.

This book covers the various Codecs used for compressing Video and Audio information. It seems to be very comprehensive. One thing I really liked was that the book seemed to be logically laid out in a manner which made the often complex material easier to understand. I would say the level of this book is geared toward the advanced to expert individual who uses compression as part of their work. This book is a winner.

Video and audio compression. How many ways are there to compress a digital media file? Every year at the National Association of Broadcasters convention in Las Vegas, we all learn about the latest and greatest codec that will change everything? Who remembers when Avid released AVR 26? Nothing new stays that way.

Compression is a very broad and deep topic. The principles stay the same, but the codecs always continue to get better. The second edition of "Great Video and Audio" takes it all in for you and presents it in a concise, yet meaty at almost 600 pages, manner. After reading this book, you will be fully immersed in the world of compression and have the necessary understanding to navigate the choices for your project. It will even prepare you for the codecs yet to come.

The number of venues and devices that use video keeps increasing, as does the size and quality. Delivering all that data to various platforms with reasonable file sizes takes knowledge of compression. Luckily, there's Compression for Great Video and Audio.

This book is incredibly thorough, breaking down every aspect of how each codec processes data. It's incredibly technical and if you're more into content creation than computer science like I am, a lot of this might go over your head.

Even if you're not into tons of technical specs and just want to know how best to use a given codec, each chapter ends with a well-laid out tutorial of a typical real-world use of that codec. If you read the first few chapters and the tutorials, you can likely skim much of the rest of this hefty book.

One problem with the book is the pictures. It's hard to see differences in compression with small black & white printed images instead of full-sized screencaps; and sometimes the full-color plates in the back of the book don't do much better. Sadly there doesn't seem to be a companion site to rectify this.

Compression for Great Video and Audio probably isn't something you'll ever read casually when you're bored. However if you come across the need for a specific form of compression, you'll be glad to have this book around.

I got this for my husband for christmas, he was shocked there was that much information to make up such a thick book, he's always had a skill for compressing video so I knew he would love this. He was impressed!

The author knows the realities -- in a digital world loaded with audio applications, many users futz around, get a result that sounds and looks ok, and tend to move on. This book is dedicated to teaching people how truly manipulate compressed media data to get the best results possible. The author starts with some of the basic physics of audio and visual, and them moves into more sophisticated territory such as quantization.

Throughout, this book presents both the nitty-gritty details and a large overview. For this reason, it functions as a quick how-to that can solve a problem and also as an all-purpose reference text.

The meat of the meal is chapter 3 which is about the basics of compression. The clarity and sophistication brought to the part of the book is admirable.

Throughout, the book presents matters in a clear writing style and the layout is decent.

I liked it. This was a heavy one - 579 pages of heavy paper. In short, the book was dense. However, the subject matter was interesting. The author says the target audience is comprised of people who come from the worlds of video or the Web. I say the target audience probably comes from both worlds at the same time, which includes people like me.

The book is divided (but not equally) into three parts:
I. Chapters 1-3 regarding general principles of vision, compression, and how compressed video operates.
II. Chapters 4-8 regarding fundamentals of video technology and the non-codec parts of the compression workflow.
III. Chapters 9-28 regarding specific video tools and technologies.

I'm no wiz with digital file compression, and I didn't read the book to become one. However, if I wanted to really study what the book provides, then I could probably be well on my way to becoming an expert. In reading the book I was more interested in the general concepts, ideas, and facts presented. I certainly do not want to be tested on the material.

But I saw a few things about the book that if changed would have forced me to bump up my review rating. I thought chapters 9 through 28 were great. They covered the different file formats and codec programs. I wouldn't change a thing about them. However, I did have a little problem with chapters 1, 2, and 4-6. I did not see a need for any of them. I think the intro was good, Chapter 1 was good, Chapter 3 was good, and there should have been a new chapter entitled "What are Codecs?" inserted after Chapter 3 but before chapters 7 and 8 which covered using codecs. 4 stars!

Waggoner clearly aims his book at the engineering professional who is already [or at least had better be!] proficient in the general area of video and audio compression. The book is NOT for the neophyte. Also, there is no coverage here of the mathematics behind the various compression methods. Instead, that is relegated to a finer detailed track for which you need to look elsewhere. What the author has done is provide extensive discussions at the systems level above the algorithms. The algorithms can be regarded as black boxes, though crucial details are provided about the motivating ideas behind some. Like MPEG 2, for instance.

The coverage of common and not so common compression methods is comprehensive. For example, I looked up the chapter on Ogg, which is a minor encoding used for audio, that claims to be patent free. The discussion about Ogg was lucid and concise, and more detailed than what you might find on Wikipedia.

A lot of the text is devoted to describing the codecs available for each compression method. Along with a summary of the relative availability and how [out]dated each codec might be. This advice could be the most useful aspect of the book for many readers. Another related feature is the many remarks about the hardware and firmware you are likely to encounter. Equally of merit are the assessments of what is outdated, so that you can avoid wasting time using these.

While I'm not a video professional, I create video projects fairly often for various purposes. The part of the process that always confuses me is converting them to a format that will balance quality and file size. Sometimes you need things small enough to send via email, sometimes you want the best possible quality but a format that can be used on different kinds of systems where people won't have to download anything to play it, sometimes you need to make a range of copies in different formats. I have tended to find the process a bit mystifying, and tend just to find something that seems to work and go with it on a case by case basis. The worst is when I think I've set the compression right but it ends up being a bit too large of a file size for where I need to upload it or how I need to send it and then I have to decide whether to try again (and depending on how I created the file that can take a very long time) or just to re-compress what I already have using a different method. (I often end up creating files with my editing or compositing programs, compressing them on export and then, when I find they're not quite a small enough file size, compressing them further with Toast. I really don't think that's the best workflow but it seems more or less to work and it's the best I can do when I'm in a hurry).

I picked this up because I wanted to understand better what I was doing and not just "wing it." After reading through most of this (the last half of the book is more of a reference than something to read through) I think I do understand better what I'm doing, but part of the message of this book is that there's no one size fits all solution to video and audio compression and you really do need to evaluate things on a case by case basis. Still it's a very thorough and comprehensive guide - that explains in general terms how and why various compression schemes work, but also manages to give a sense for some of the history and theory behind the wide range of different codecs and compression workflows. In hindsight, it's probably more than I really needed to know for my purposes - but I was surprised by how readable and interesting it was. The author is uniquely qualified to write it and to bring an intriguing perspective, as someone who has been working on the technical end of video for over twenty years, and also has a background and interest in the way the brain processes sound and image.

The first chapter outlines why the biology of hearing and sight is relevant to the technology of compression - for example, the fact that the eyes are much more sensitive to differentiations in the shadows than in the highlights impacts how much such data is required to capture different luminance ranges. The next several chapters give an overview of compression technology and outline how understanding compression affects how best to plan for and produce video. While it might seem like the tail wagging the dog, if you know that the venue for a video is primarily on the web and you know the data rate, it's essential to think in advance about how the content of the video might affect the quality of the final product. Fast cutting, for example, or rapid changes in content won't compress as well as slow cuts. The last several chapters provide discussions of the nature and merits of a wide range of video codecs and formats. I found the histories behind the various codecs - how and why they were developed - to be intriguing and it did shed light on the value of each codec.

One thing the author did at the beginning was outline several common problems and ways they could be solved - and I liked that practical approach. I kind of wish there were more of that - the outline of basic problems was a bit eclectic, and I would have liked a quick primer up front. In the best case scenario an opening section the opening section would explain in a nutshell what compression was and would sum up the rest of the book into a quick step by step practical primer. Then, I think the rest of the book - which is extremely thorough, and slightly technical - would work as a comprehensive reference. As it was it felt like apart from a few bits of practical advice - and apart from the fact that the explanations read well and were quite illuminating - you had to read a lot before you start to get to something you can really use, so that while this would be an excellent primer on video for those who need to know exactly how it works, it is less practical for a user like me who really just wants a basic understanding for a better workflow.