God bless 'im, Dylan's Digital Video Challenge got me off my butt and shooting my first *movie*. (I use that term loosely.) It's finished; now I just need to get it on my Website by Friday night.

I knew if I came here first and nosed around I wouldn't enter the challenge, and sure enough, after reading through some threads I still don't have a clue. Does anyone have the time or inclination (make that "mercy") to give me some basic pointers/advice? Or walk me through the process? The guy who did this sort of thing moved away, so I need to learn anyway. I've got a friend willing to upload it--I just have to present it in something other than the avi I've got right now.

Shooting was done with XL1s, edited in Vegas 5. The video clip is 650 MB, 2 minutes and 59 seconds (just under the wire!). Other than the obvious, like the 29fps, I don't even know what details to include. Dylan said it would be nice if it was in a format for both PC and Mac users; besides that, I suppose it just needs to be small (?).

It's not like me to take the "ready, fire, aim" approach, but this deal just sounded like too much fun to pass up. It HAS been great fun, but I'm also worn to a frazzle. Can someone help me jump this last hurdle? Please? : )

Lorinda, in Vegas go

File->Render As and select one of the Quicktime (.mov) codecs. That should be fine. Something like 256Kbps will generate a full framerate 320x240 file of reasonable quality and that will be about 5 megs in size. This is what I will upload. I will also upload some different versions for other people. Like a modem one and a 1MBps one.

One thing to take note of. If you have any quiet sound effects, whispers etc, they will almost disappear after rendering. I had to make my quiet stuff slightly louder so that when rendered it came out OK.

Cheers
Aaron

Hey, thanks, Aaron!

That sounds waayyy too easy--especially after some of the info I found here about taking out frames and stuff like that. What a relief!

If you don't mind, I've got one more question: Because I had the room I included credits and a logo-type thing at the end. If I take those off, thereby making the file smaller, will that help the quality? This clip needs all the help it can get!

By the way, thank you for the tip on quiet audio. There is one place in mine that might be a problem.

No, the credits won't matter much at all. It may shrink the filesize down a little - my credits take up about 250k - but I wouldn't worry about it too much. And no, it won't help quality of the resulting video.


Re audio: Do a test render and watch your film so you can see the trouble spots. My film relies on hearing the softer bits, so if I hadn't of checked, people just would have missed half the stuff!

Good luck and I look forward to see your film!
Aaron