converting/compressing for web

cecil995

cecil995

Well-known member
Hey guys,

I notice that there are alot of different ways to get your video small enough to go on the web, but I wanted to get some input as to the best methods. I mostly do windows media files because they are alittle more universal, but nothing kills me more than having a great looking product on my screen, only to compress it and it looks blocky as hell on the web. I use premiere pro media encoder...is that my problem...are there better encoders out there? I am a pc user....yeah I know ...its not final cut....the god of all editing software....so if anyone can offer some advice it would be appreciated
 
i think windows media right now is the best.
i just made a 3 minute reel into 9,9MB and it looks great.
 
cecil995 said:
Here is a big example of what my problem is...

http://www.centredaily.com/mld/centredaily/13052658.htm

a short video i did for penn state homecoming football game

the original file was 660mb...the site wanted it compressed to alittle more than 5mb.
surely there must be a better way....this makes my dvx look like a best buy bargin camcorder
Click to expand...

What file format and size did you give the Centre Daily Times? (I'm PSU alumni from 1993!!)

They are using the Macromedia Flash Media Display component and an FLV file. I believe they are actually streaming it with a Flash Sever. They probably converted your file to Flash 7. What I am guessing is that you first converted it, perhaps to a 320x240 file size, maybe WMV. Then they re-compressed it to an FLV file, but made a larger size, perhaps 480x360. This would cause problems with the look of the video.

The total time is only about 3 minutes, so you should be able to make a nice looking flv at about 10-12 MB final file size.
 
Hey Tuffgong

Thanks for the input to my problem. I am a newbie when it comes to compressing video for the web. I did give the CDT a windows media file to work with. I have done alittle research since my last post on here and found alot of good things about encoding the mpeg-4, and since the CDT requested that I give them something that will work with quicktime ( they use macs at their office) I think that I might have found my solution. However, I am using premiere pro for windows and have not found a good mpeg-4 encoder yet ( premiere pro will not encode to that codec)

If I am going down the wrong path with this, I would rather find out now before I invest more time into it.

btw...how did you come up with the conclusion that they were using Macromedia Flash Display......just a newbie question hahaha
 
cecil, I can export in mpeg-4, and it looks great.

Problem is, doesn't do much compressing. A 4-minute short film comes out to 242 mb at 640x480
 
cecil995 said:
btw...how did you come up with the conclusion that they were using Macromedia Flash Display......just a newbie question hahaha
Click to expand...

The player that plays your movie is the Flash Media Display Component. I use it every now and again. Right click anywhere on the player and it will say it is Flash.

Check this out. I took their QuickTime video clips, encoded them to Flash .flv, and then made a little interactive menu to view each clip:

http://video.onsight-media.com/newbelgiumbrewery/nbvideo.htm
 
well that answers my question on that. Thanks for the info Tuffgoing. So its better to take my uncompressed video and then convert to flash flv. Those clips on that link you showed looked alot better than what I was putting out....what were the sizes of the close clips?
 
well, those clips started out as film, then ne Belgium did the original conversion to QuickTime files, so I guess I don't really know what the compression settings were. I just took the compressed QuickTime files and re-converted to flv so I could use them inside the Flash program.

There is a lot to be said for good source material even when compressing for the web.
 
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