I previously published this guide for another user. Perhaps you'll find it useful.

http://s3dl.com/high-bitrate-h264-files-with-handbrake.php

Self-contained means that the video, audio and even embedded captions are all contained within the single file and can therefore be easily sent, downloaded, copied or transferred between different computers for a similar viewing experience.

MP4 is self-contained and is playable in Quicktime, QT alternative (MPC), VLC, WMP, etc

The alternative to self-contained are reference files, where the pseudo-movie file is much smaller, because it only contains references to the raw footage, but it does not contain the actual footage in itself.

There is plenty of bandwidth on H.264 at 16Mbps to obtain great quality at very small file sizes.

For reference, a minute of 1080i60 DVCProHD will need around 864 Megabytes of space, so (for example) a short 8 minutes film will take almost 7 Gigabytes of space. If you do a 2-pass encoding and limit the bitrate to 16Mbps, H.264 will consume some 940 Megabytes of space for the same 8 minutes of 1080p video, but this is an approximation since you'll have Variable Bitrate.

See my changes on the attached image. I reduced the video bitrate to accommodate the audio track and still remain under 16Mbps as a whole.

NOTE: I misread your message and thought you had a maximum bitrate limit of 16Mbps. Instead of the value posted on the attached image, I suggest to stay within Blu-Ray specifications (just in case). For 1080p24 (or 23.976) is 40000kbps. 20 or 30Mbps will be sufficient in any case.

Motion-JPEG (as you may know) is simply a series of JPEG images. In that sense, they are independent from each other (very much intra-frame) but lossy as any JPEG image. As I recall, a simple 200% zoom into a M-JPEG video reveals pixelation (VS the original).

With H.264 (x.264 on handbrake) you have the added advantage of deblocking on playback and the compression is much more efficient. If H.264 is not your cup of tea, then personally I would go with AIC or ProRes before going with M-JPEG.

Ideally, the festival should disclose what's the final format they plan to keep most entries in. There's the possibility that they may accept AIC, DVCProHD, ProRes, and M-JPEG because they are all Intra and easy to convert to a unified format for display. If H.264 was that end format, then at least you can have full control over the compression of your master. This is of course, speculation.

I just talked with the guy who's running this festival and he said .mp4 is out of the question because it may be in a format they don't accept. He said it has to be in a quicktime...his response:

"Note that often mp4 files aren't Quicktime files and sometimes we cannot convert them to screening format, which would lead to the film being disqualified. It's much better to give us a Motion JPEG-A mov or a H.264 mov than an mp4. Hope that helps!"

I'm having a tough time with Handbrake. I'm so used to using Vegas Studio HD 11 and MPEG Streamclip...wondering if I output in Sony AVC/MVC Blu-ray 1920x1080-24p, 16 Mpbs video stream (which looks to be the best setting)...this will leave me with a 68mb .mp4 clip for a 20 second long test video. If I run that through MPEG Streamclip to export as a Quicktime file...it gives me a list of options, one of which is a H.264 file..it also gives you the option of a multi-pass, which I'm assuming makes retain more quality...that comes out about the same size 60+ Mb, but as a .mov file.....is that actually a H.264 mov file or have I already degraded the file to the point where it no longer retains its original quality.

Sorry I'm not very technical savvy at this stuff, I'm used to doing small clips. I'm nervous about putting something on a big screen with no way to visually test it out first. Thanks again for the help.

Awesome, thanks a lot! I'm heading into work now too. I'll check it out later. Unfortunately I have Vegas Home Studio HD 11 and not some of the more expensive versions. It may be limited in options for outputting, but it does offer quite a bit of choices.

I forgot that in Streamclip 'multipass' really means multiple passes and not just '2-pass' :-)

Finally I created an MOV with H.264 from Streamclip and I can say that the results were not even close to what the original looks like. I'll have to investigate further. Luckily, half the job is done by exporting a very high quality video to a self contained DNxHD MOV from Vegas Home Studio.

@bostonmike My attempts at creating an H.264/AAC under an MOV container have proven largely unsuccessful. So far I've used Streamclip and XMedia Recode. Both ingest my DNxHD master correctly and allow me to setup the proper directives for encoding. The result however, is unplayable (corrupted frames, stuttering video) on my system.

Granted, I do not have quicktime installed on my Windows box, but QT Alternative, and VLC doesn't like the resulting files either. My research shows that with H.264 under an MOV, one cannot simply adjust the bitrate at will, since bitrates are 'locked' and managed by some 'level settings' which of course, I have no access to on a windows box with a third-party software encoder.

I am almost 100% certain that if I took the DNxHD MOV master to work and used Compressor in OSX to create an H.264 MOV, there wouldn't be any issues.

The funny thing is that using under handbrake (and the posted settings) I can produce flawless H.264/AAC with an MP4 container. See (or download) the following 30sec video (raw MTS to Vegas timeline to DNxHD 1080p 29,97 (mov) to MP4 under handbrake.

http://min.us/mblCkrFx6k

More research is needed. Next I'll simply try to customize a Vegas Movie Studio template and attempt to output an H.264/MOV directly from the timeline.

@bostonmike good bump on this topic.

As it turns out, Render As... Quicktime (MOV) - Customize Template.. does not give the option to select H.264 as a video compressor. It appears to be a codec licencing issue between Sony and Apple (Sony already has H.264 with AVC).

One way around this is to simply Render As.. Sony AVC H.264 (mp4), and then use QT Pro, open the MP4 and Save as... Self-Contained movie. This will copy the H.264 encoded video stream into an MOV wrapper without re-encoding. Of course, this requires the Pro version of QT to be installed.

As silly as this sounds, I'm back to square one: A DNxHD/MJPEG/Matrox MPEG-2 I-Frame master file from Vegas that needs to be rendered to H.264 with an MOV wrapper using a third party application. Handbrake only does MP4/MKV and MPEG Streamclip did not create a usable MOV file from my master.

Do the contest rules specify more formats than H.264 MOV?

Initial tests look pretty good. Quicktime in OSX machines took the H.264 MOV file without issues. Compressor also took the file and was able to convert it to other formats. I believe this is the way to go. Once I'm back home I will go into details, but basically..

Render As.. multi-pass Sony AVC (h264 mp4, not Bluray) with custom bitrate & audio settings, Open MP4 in Streamclip and save as.. quicktime MOV. Contents are simply copied into a new wrapper. done.