I recently received some questions from a potential viewer about our use of Quicktime, and it is enough of an issue that I wanted to address it in more detail.

Question: Why do you use H.264 codec? Where can I get it, all I can find is Quicktime 6.5?

Answer: H.264 is really, really cool. It’s produces amazing results. It can reduce a 1.85gb DV file to 150mb at full resolution with very little degradation of image quality and no visible problems with high-motion scenes. It is the coming standard for multimedia from cell phones up to High Definition TV.

We assemble this program on a Powermac using FinalCut Pro. Quicktime is the default format on a Mac, and QuickTime 7 has been available on the Mac for some time now, and in this case, H.264 is the best quality codec available to us.

The problem is that QT 7 hasn’t been officially released on the Windows platform. The Preview Release for Windows has been available for some time now, and it works well. We’re really surprised the final version hasn’t been released.

Meanwhile on the Apple site, the QT Preview Release is a little hard to spot, so here’s a direct link: Quicktime 7 for Windows Public Preview 2
The direct link for the Mac version is here: Quicktime 7

Depending on how things go, we might consider producing an XVID version if demand warrants it. In the meantime, thanks for being patient.