best output/compression settings for fast online video?

[homestar_kevin]

So I'm working with a company that is doing online courses.

We have been making a lot of videos to put into the courseware and are now getting closer to distributing it.

We've started putting the Course LMS and things together and are starting to see that our video hosting stuff might not be good enough foe what we want.

We have a Screencast account and are trying to use that, but the video's we're outputting are all around 50 MB's.

Although this is relatively small, there will be 90 total and they lag a bit when played. We're really hoping for seamlessly loading videos that don't have to stop and start

Debating using youtube, but we don't like that you can click the video and get taken out of the courseware as that could be disruptive.

We're trying to go to a smaller size so that they can load and play seemlessly/quicker in the course while still keeping a respectable quality.

The video's are all 720p, most with a layer or two of video and some text.

In the end, we will have 90 videos to comprise 3 lessons.

So I'm searching for the best compression settings to send this all out as.

We have cs5.5 master suite, so I'll be using media encoder.

 

[Shooter]

Would Flash work for you?

 

[Jim Simon]

H.264 is probably the best codec out there right now. Meaning at any given bitrate, H.264 will look better than any other codec at that same bitrate. So start there.

As for what bitrate to use? Well, that may take some experimenting to get just the right combination of quality/file size.

 

[Athiril]

If you want fast, the MainConcept Codec Suite 5 Plugin (I know not open source) has H.264 CUDA encoding. Which is very fast.

 

[homestar_kevin]

Thanks for the responses so far guys!

Would Flash work for you?

Yes, I think we've found a pretty middle ground compression setting by bumping everything out as f4v's


Its taken the videos from about 50 MB's to ~15-20 MB's and the quality hasn't taken THAT big of a hit

 

[groveChuck]

Debating using youtube, but we don't like that you can click the video and get taken out of the courseware as that could be disruptive.

We're trying to go to a smaller size so that they can load and play seemlessly/quicker in the course while still keeping a respectable quality.

The video's are all 720p, most with a layer or two of video and some text.

I think you can set up Vimeo so there are no icons to click on that will take you away from the embedded player (right?), and Vimeo plays pretty quickly in 720.
And you can keep the file size and bitrate as high as needed.

Unless, of course, you're totally opposed to an embedded player.

 

[homestar_kevin]

That sounds good. I have a non pro vimeo account, but have never dug into all the options, or read on what the pro can do.


We'll be embedding all the videos onto a pop out courseware window, so we're definitely cool with embedded video, we just don't like how you can click the youtube icon and get taken to the youtube url.

It's not an issue the majority of the time, but in this instance we don't want people to be able to navigate out of the window by accident.

 

[groveChuck]

Vimeo Plus may be enough.

Not sure if a free account will give you the embed options (if you're free, not Plus), but it might- go to Settings/Embedding.

You can take away all the buttons (other than play), or leave the full screen option, if that doesn't interfere with your page layout.
I think that removing all those buttons (including Outro- Show Nothing) will prevent people from clicking directly to Vimeo.

 

[ShawnLam]

Here is an article I wrote on Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 and Max Render Quality.

Make sure you have the correct frame rate when using the presets (they often get them wrong) and select max render quality.

H.264 is the codec you want to use.