AVI conversion to web file
 

I recorded a 45 minute presentation for a business and now they also want it to put up on thier website to download. I'm using the latest version of Premiere and need some suggestions on how to do this. There are so many choices in bit rate and quicktime or wmv. Thanks for any suggestions here.

If there's a template option for 256 kbps WMV, I'd go with that. Simple, small, no Quicktime download required for PC users.

Your first question...
 

... has to be: who is this business' targeted audience? If it's Mac users, go with QT. But if you target the general audience, WinMedia is your best choice not only for quality but for the number of people that will be able to watch the video. Personally I would rather download the free Windows Media Encoder and use that for encoding, Adobe Premiere will give you by far less flexibility.

As Robert mentioned, not many everyday PC users want or even know how to install yet another player on their machine.

Thanks for the feedback. I took the advice and got everything going.

What are some of the settings you are using? What KBPS are you seeing? How is the quality?

I went to Windows website and did a search for the Media Encoder and used theirs. I'd have to see the exact settings I used. I'm not at home at the moment. It cut down 6Gb file down to 50Mb. Quality is better than I thought it would be. I use Premiere Pro CS2 and I know they made tremendous improvements in their encoder interface but I used to have a lot of problems with the previous version that I just use the Windows version.

For cross-platform compatibility, it's hard to beat Flash videos on the Web. You can encode FLV files straight from PPro and AE. Then use FLVPLAYER or another client-side app. to embed videos right on a webpage (like You Tube, etc. does).

And QT and WMV really don't have the same acceptance as Flash (Mac users hate WMV and PC users get annoyed with QT, etc.).

I do Flash shorts on my blog via FLVPLAYER and have a plug-in for WordPress (blogging software). It's really pretty slick, IMHO. Here's some more details about what I did: http://www.brownland.org/blog/2007/01/17/flv-test/

Just a thought,
Brian Brown
BrownCow Productions