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10.4: Test .zip archives in the Finder with Automator
Authored by: turkchgo on Jul 27, '06 12:42:16PM
"As one who works from home as an animator and video editor, "

I don't get why someone who works with large video and image files would need to make use of a zip utility considering it does nothing but maybe shave a few kilobits of metadata off the files?

The only reason I can think of is to make a single file out of many small ones?

Zip and Stuffit have little to no effect on video, audio or image data. They do make nice single file packages out of say 20 photos.

But zipping a 500Mb or 1Gb DV or MPEG file is just a waste of CPU cycles on both ends.

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10.4: Test .zip archives in the Finder with Automator
Authored by: osxpounder on Jul 27, '06 01:24:29PM

As a person who does similar work, I'd be interested to see a reply to that question, too: why bother zipping a file that won't compress much?

I can think of a few reasons, but I won't second-guess your motives. I'm interested in what you think. I'll just point out that a ZIP can keep relative folder and file locations intact, in case your project relies on such things. I think sometimes OSX has trouble unzipping files that contains 2 or more folders of the same name, but can't reproduce the problem right now, so I'm not even sure I remember that right.



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Compression varies depending on codec
Authored by: jvr on Jul 28, '06 09:00:56AM

I send & receive QuickTime movies rendered in a variety of codecs, and the level of compression accomplished by zip does vary, depending on the codec used. Yes, there are some codecs for which zip is not helpful, but there are others for which it cuts the file size nearly in half.

Example:
A 15 second logo animation with alpha channel, 720 x 486, 29.97 fps, 32-bit Animation codec.
Before zip: 199 MB
After zip: 122 MB

That's enough compression to save a significant amount of time on upload over my cable connection.



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