I've watched all segments but the Dykinga segment and I must say I was most noticeably impressed by the video quality of the Antarctic segment. Watching the HD version on my Dell 24 inch LCD in full screen mode was just beautiful! Anything different in this LLVJ vs. others?
Not really, the Antarctic video was shot in AVCHD on the Sony SR12. To my eye, this format seems to yield better low bitrate H264 .mp4 files than the obviously higher quality original HD files from the Sony EX1 reencoded for web download at the low bitrate.
A bit of a riddle, but somehow I think that since the originals from the SR12 are compressed in H264 (whereas the EX1 is compressed in Sony's proprietary EX format) it yields good results when re-encoded with the same codec. If that makes any sense to you!!
The Spring RunOff piece was all Sony EX1 originals and requires a much higher bitrate in the web downloads to achieve good quality
Basically my theory is:
H264 original > H264 web files = good low bitrate encodes
Sony EX original > H264 web files = need for higher bitrate
I could be wrong tho' - there are a lot of variables here. For instance there are a lot of blue or white areas in the Antarctic piece whereas the Spring RunOff is full of branches, moose hairs, rain, shallow DoF and other fine detail...