Starting over with my videos online.
 

we have a lot of video footage on our website, and I think we need to reformat it. It just takes too long to download for viewing.

We have all the equipment and lots of great software. I think we use Sorenson Squeeze. I just think we don't know the right parameters.

Here's our website:
http://www.bradmays.com

I'm not the technical person here, so I'm unclear on how to ask the question. What I think I want to know is what size the picture should be to make downloading easier, and is there anything we can do with compression to make it faster?

I'm guessing that we can have size or clarity. I think I'd rather have clarity.

Anyway, any help is appreciated. If you can start at square one and assume I don't know any of the technical language, that would help. Because I don't.

Thanks so much.

Check out http://www.dialogcuviata.com and watch the first 3 minutes of video. If you like the quality, let me know and I'll give you the details.

Ervin,

Thank you for the response. I can only get the first few seconds of the video to play - up to the word "scrii". But what I saw looks gorgeous.

Lori

Sounds like your internet connection is not fast enough to sustain 512 Kbps - that's the actual bitrate. Try pausing playback for a while to allow for buffering in the background.

I take my video and resize in Virtualdub (free), deinterlacing and adding a little sharpens at the same time, and export to a HUFFYUV avi file. Then I take this intermediary file and load it in Procoder to encode to Windows Media. If you don't have Procoder, you can use Windows Media Encoder (free) with same results.

One of these days I hope I find the time to write a little tutorial for those interested.

Ervin,


thank you. What size?

Lori

I use 480x360 for 4x3 video.

Ahhhh, we dont' have the Windows stuff. D'oh.

Got any tips for us for Quicktime?

QuickTime
 

Lori, I have done extensive testing, and what I found is that none of the programs I tested do a decent job at resizing. So regardless of what format you choose, do the resizing in a program that does it properly - VirtualDub for the PC, not sure what's available on other platforms. Keep in mind, all my experience is PC only.

Tips for QT? Use it only if your target audience is the media world (Mac users only amount for less than 5% of all computer users); if you go for average Joe, go either WM (better quality, comes standard on all PCs) or Flash (virtually all computers have the player).

If you just want your people to watch the video online quickly I think its hard to ignore flash and FLVs. Its what youtube uses for a reason. I use it for my sites online video and then I provide a WMV or Quicktime download. If you use the right tools you can even host versions based on the users connection. I use the JW FLV player for some awesome results. If you take the time to setup the FLV Presets you can get good results. They may not be the best but they are more than enough for people looking through and the ones who want more can download the higher quality files :)

As for not having WMV, I suggest getting flip4mac and paying for it and you can then encode using it with Sorenson Squeeze.