Video Internet Compression

[Daniel Patton]

Originally Posted by Mark Silva

What would you rather have? that it works with no problems? Or getting a bunch of phone calls with "I see a white screen but I hear sound" or "Its a white screen and says I need an update but I'm computer illiterate"

You get the picture. :)

HA! We more than get it, been there done that. I could not agree more.

Unlike creating video strictly for the TV/DVD/CD market where image quality is key, It's a different world when you have to create and deliver content for the masses over the internet. Like you said, unless you want to get a lot of ugly calls, or lose viewers in the first two clicks, you have to create as compelling content as you can while maintaining sight of the lowest common denominator. That's our reason behind the use of Flash, it has the single largest install base over any codec/viewer. It may not look as good or handle video playback as well as another codec install, but it works every time. Less important on a $5k - $10k site, but when they spend $50k - $100k on video and that again for a web site you have no room for error. [/soapbox]

Hence, the same reason you use an older Quicktime essentially.

[Mark Silva]

Yep exactly Daniel.

And I must say I'm VERY impressed with the flash videos I've seen running on web sites. They look great, start rather instantly (on broadband at least) and they sound good too.

[Stephen L. Noe]

Who can write the syntax to embed a flash video (flv) in a web page? Can you please tell me what the syntax is so I can try and embed an flv in a web page?

I've always wanted to do it but never took the time to look it up.

Also,

For the video quality to compression to compatability, DivX is an incredible solution. Their group has come up with a great codec for HD web video.

[Daniel Patton]

We use Flash MX 2004 and embed it into SWF as a shell and then reference it that way. I might be able to generate a SWF shell for your FLV files if you tell me:

- the size (res) of the video you have encoded to FLV
- The exact name of the FLV file so it looks for it proper

Our Flash developer is at a movie right now but he is due back to the office in a few minutes (ugly project deadline Sunday, we are all working late). It would only take him a second. I mostly shoot and edit... he Flash's (as bad as that sounds).

[Nate Weaver]

Stephen, look at my website. Dreamweaver generated the code for my Flash video, but it's clean and easily picked apart.

Flash video clips are based on Quicktime, and use either Sorenson 3 codec (Flash 7 viewable) or On2 VP4 (only viewable with Flash 8 plug)

[Warren Shultz]

Nate, are you able to host your own .flv files or are they hosted remotely? They start very quickly.

[Stephen L. Noe]

I finally took the time to figured it out.

Liquid exports the flv files but I never took the time to figure out how to embed them. Now I know.

Still the quality is no where near DivX, WMV or H.264 but for web delivery I can see the benefit. Too bad Real Media had to sell out to the advertisers back in '98. They would have owned the internet delivery format.

[Joyce Mahoney]

h.264 codec on QT

[Tim Dashwood]

Originally Posted by Joyce Mahoney

Still TOO BIG. h.264 codec on QT

What bitrate had you chosen?

Encoding really can be an artform - and many of the advanced functions in Compressor are undocumented (I can't tell what they do because I don't know.)
You should decide how big you want the final file to be, then calculate what bitrate (bits per second) would be required for the program length.

We know that there are 8 bits (b) in a byte (B), 1024 Bits (b) in a KiloBit (kb), 1024 Bytes (B) in a KiloByte (KB) and 1024 KiloBytes (KB) in a MegaByte (MB.)

Therefore divide the target kb by the amount of seconds to come up with kb/s.

Program length in minutes = P
Target File size in MB = T

So (T x 1024 x 8) / (P x 60) = Target bitrate in kilobits per second (kb/s)

Divide the result by 1024 to get Megabits per second. (Mb/s)


For example, if your program is 10 minutes long and we want the final file size for the internet to be 100MB, then plug the following into the equation:

(100 x 1024 x 8) / (10 x 6) = 1365 kb/s or 1.3 Mb/s

[Paolo Ciccone]

Originally Posted by Joyce Mahoney

h.264 codec on QT

Joyce, what are your settings. Medium Quality h.264 will lead excellent reasults while making the file substantially smaller than what you get with 'High Quality'.
Also, what resolution are you trying?

[John Mitchell]

Originally Posted by Paolo Ciccone

I doubt it, H.264 is *the* new feature of QT 7. If you can give me a link to one of the files that you cannot play I can find out what codec you're missing. If they are m2t files then you need another player like VLC as .m2t are not yet supported by QT.

They were commercials that Marc Higa shot...

http://modernartpictures.com/commercialLaguna.html

Plays fine on my machine at work...

[John Mitchell]

Originally Posted by Tim Dashwood

What bitrate had you chosen?

For example, if your program is 10 minutes long and we want the final file size for the internet to be 100MB, then plug the following into the equation:

(100 x 1024 x 8) / (10 x 6) = 1365 kb/s or 1.3 Mb/s

Tim -there are about at least 3 good bitrate calculators (free) on the PC - perhaps you can recommend one for all your fellow Mac users?

This is the one I use on the PC

http://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=...ate_calculator

Great for DVD compression, but you can enter custom target sizes.

[Joyce Mahoney]

It seems like I've tried everything. I'll go into Premiere, select Video Settings, reduce the quality to 50%, set fps to 15 and codec to H.264 and I'm coming up with 100MB+ files for 3 minute .mov. Something has to be amis!

[Stephen L. Noe]

Originally Posted by Joyce Mahoney

It seems like I've tried everything. I'll go into Premiere, select Video Settings, reduce the quality to 50%, set fps to 15 and codec to H.264 and I'm coming up with 100MB+ files for 3 minute .mov. Something has to be amis!

Is there a selection for "Quarter Size"?

[Jonathan Ames]

If it's any consolataion, Joyce, I'm having the same issues. I downloaded QT 7, installed it, pulled up the Premiere file and went to export it to miovie using the same settings and I'm getting the same results. Mine's about 4 minutes and I'm getting 114MB results.