Rendering for the web
 

Does anyone have extensive experience rendering video for the web out of an avid? I've spent over five years doing it from Sony Vegas, but the broadcast team I am now working with uses avid. I am very new to avid. We stream in windows media, and our size is going to be 360x240. From Vegas, I two-pass encoded to a constant bit rate (CBR) at 29.97 fps. However, while it was CBR, there were multiple bit rates embedded (200k, 300k, 500k), so that the file streamed at a constant bit rate based on the user's connection. Within my render settings, I have to set a slider that weighs smoothness vs. sharpness. I set it at 75, which favors sharpness, but I've found that with a decent connection, it plays very smoothly and looks sharp.

I would like to use some of these ideas for rendering from the avid, or it's Sorenson Squeeze. I'm always open to other opinions as well. Has anyone found a successful rendering formula from avid for the web?

For :30 sec. spots (client approval clips), I use an Avid export preset win media full frame rate VBR at 320x 240 and it works fine. For longer form videos I export a Quicktime reference out of Avid and use Sorenson Squeeze. Version 4.2 encodes faster than Avid and I hear that v. 4.5 is very very fast. For anything other than client approvals I use flash, encoded via Sorenson.

Good luck with your new gig,

Thanks for the reply David. The video that we are going to be encoding will be 3-4 minute features, meant only for the web, many of them containing football game or practice footage. We have to use wmv for the present. So I am looking for render settings that can produce a sharp looking, yet smooth moving windows media stream.

Does anyone have extensive experience rendering windows media files for the web?

I've done a lot of trial and error here. Avid will only do single pass and you can get double pass using Windows Media Encoder (WME).

The issues are that WME can't encode native HDV so you would have to fuse your timeline to AVI DV then bring into MWE. A PITA to be honest. I do get my best SD results that way though.

Avid is great for a quick and dirty export to WMV. I'm finding that external encoding tools do a better job keeping quality up and its much easier to do some 'tweaking' to the compression and get the file just right. Going in and chaning the profiles in Avid to do your 'tweaking' isn't fun.

If I'm in a hurry, I let Avid so the conversion. If I have time and quality is the objective, I use an external encoder like MWE.

Now I've got to buy a good one for FLASH.. :(

Chris

Thanks Chris. I've actually had someone else suggest doing something similiar, but I've got a couple of questions. My understanding is that the best and quickest way to export from avid is to do it as a .mov file. WME, however, won't convert .mov files. Have you found a way to export a high-quality, yet somewhat quick .avi file? How are performing this step? I'm trying to go 360x240, but I'm assuming you are rendering to 720x480 or somewhere in that ballpark, correct?