Talking Heads Want Better Audio

Ryan Hodson, a talented artist and videoblogger, just posted a talking-head video comment, that she 'compressed the living hell out of'. If you ask me, she, like so many others, over-compressed the audio. Personally, I'd rather she made the video smaller and jerkier, but with higher audio quality. The most important part of this video is the sound of her voice, but the audio artifacts introduced by over-compression de-humanize human voices and drive me crazy. Am I the only one? I'm going to see if others in the videoblogging group agree with me and try to encourage people to not over-compress their audio.

Note: Since this video is a QuickTime demo it is only available in QuickTime format, unlike my other videos which are in multiple formats thanks to vBlog Central.

Ryan, being a video professional at her night-time day job, has access to and knows how to use high-end tools, like Cleaner 6. I decided to post an alternate, highly-compressed video comment for comparison. Since I don't have access to her high-quality master, I'm going to use my most recent video comment as an example. The video above was not automatically compressed on the server by vBlog Central, but was compressed 'by hand' on my desktop with the $29.99 QuickTime Pro version of the QuickTime Player and is hosted by vBlog Central.

Cleaner 6 gives excellent results with two-pass Sorenson VBR encoding that I can't duplicate with QT Pro (by itself), so I went for a really small video window. I used the same audio codec as Ryan, but decided to give more bandwidth to the audio to remove the artifacts. The table below compares the bandwidth used by this video and Ryan's video.

Rate	Ryan	Sean
Video Bit-Rate:	2.9 K bytes/sec	3.8 K bytes/sec
Audio Bit-Rate:	1.0 K bytes/sec	1.9 K bytes/sec
Total:	3.9 K bytes/sec	5.7 K bytes/sec

It's not fair to compare my video compression to Ryan's since she used a better tool. My point here is that if Ryan had given 0.9 K bytes/sec extra bandwidth to her audio, she would have had much better sounding audio. She could have slightly reduced her video quality or increased her overall file size by only 23%. This is why I'm asking videobloggers to not skimp on their audio quality.