Could use some direction on encoding

[Jeff Troiano]

This will most likely get moved, but I posted there too, and no one seems to be responding, and everyone in here seems to help me.

To keep it short, I filmed, edited (using strudio 8) a promo music video. Burnt to DVD worked great. Used studio 8 to create streaming download (file was about 2.6MB) audio was ok (thats fine, suppose to be FM radio quality) but the video is choppy, and blocky. Is it essential this way becuase I didn't deinterlace? (I don't think I can do this with studio 8) or is it I just not using the right program for making for the web? Just put together my new system last night, now I just have to save up the money for Vegas 4.0, and any other programs I need.

The footage was shot using only a 1cc camera, but the footage looks great played in full DVD Mpeg2 with wmp (not from the web) and also from dvd, just want it to look the best I can get it on our web site.

Feel free to check it out and offer any tips or pointers on how to get the web presentation better, or even just to tell me it suck (my first attempt at filming, editing)

http://www.fransmantra.com/fm_songs_page.html

Click on Video strip the light fantastic.

Thanks for any help

Jeff Troiano

Would like to say THANK YOU to Michael Wisniewski,
and Christopher Go. You guys made my night a little shorter by giving me a few heads up on my RAID install. Messed things up a little at first but did it all right the second time, well almost, computer thinks there is a dual boot system, just have to go into the System Registry and delete a couple of lines. THANK YOU both again.

[David Hurdon]

Hey Jeff, your video actually looks pretty good given the low bit rate used. WMP properties tells me it's 102 kbps which is only double dial up. That's not enough elbow room to compress motion without artifacts. If you aren't encoding for dial up there's no good reason to limit data rate to anything below 500 kbps, unless you have storage limitations on your host server. That's my problem, so I use 256-368 generally, in order to be able to keep a few pieces up at once. If you have the space, try encoding at 500 kbps, which should generate just under 4 MB/min in WME8 for example.
I put a short piece up last night at http://www.contentshop.tv/distilry.wmv encoded at 500 kbps. At a minute four seconds it's around 3.7 MB. I went that high because of the camera movement involved, and the result is what I'd expect using Premiere 6.02 advanced windows media export (Windows Media Encoder 8 selected). If you check it, please let me know both whether it's a quality you'd accept for your work and whether or not it freezes in the final seconds. It doesn't off my hard drive but it does off the net on my old PC.

David Hurdon

[Jeff Troiano]

First David thank you for taking the time to reply, and to post some of your owm work for me to check out, your video look crystal clear to me, thats exactly what I'm going for. Yes It did freeze at about 59 sec or 1 min. Going to have to fool around with the compression a little. I don't have that much control over alot of stuf with this program I'm using, hopefuly going to be upgrading to Vegas by the end of June (just put together my new system for editing on over the last 2 days) Only have a couple of hardware pieces to buy, then I have to save for software, and a 3cc camera.

Thanks again for taking the time to reply, you gave me the direction I needed to look into.

I thought your video was great, thank you for posting it.
Jeff Troiano

[David Hurdon]

Always a pleasure to pay back a little of the generosity I've been shown since I became obsessed. Thanks for feeding back on the video's performance. I'm putting a new version up now, with a second of black video at the end. I think skipping that step may be the cause of the fouled up last few seconds.

David Hurdon