What size to work in for flash video
 

Hi forum,

We are currently working on a short demonstration clip to be used as flash video on a web site.

The main footage is 720x576 but I am also editing (using Premiere 2) in both after effects clips and PSD's.

Is it best to work in full resolution and then reduce for final export (320x256) or work in final export resolution and create same size flv file?

Any comments would be appreciated. My current export using the built in flash exporter look rather duff.

Alex

Alex,

I think your issue may be in the .flv encoding. I know flash MX and 8 employes a crippled version of sorenson squeeze encoding suite, i'm not sure what premiere uses.

I'd recommend looking into purchasing squeeze, for when used properly, it can produce incredible results.

~Mike

Thanks Mike, i will take a look at the full version.

So do you think it is best to prepare all material (i.e illustrations, animations and title sequences) at full resolution the same as the main video and then reduce the whole lot in one go?

I was wondering if animations and title sequences were best prepared at the final resolution as reducing them later might be a bad thing.

Maybe I need to read my premiere books some more.

I have used the flv format for awhile. The new flash 8 video encoder works great.
I always edit at full resolution, no need to down size it in nle. Export as avi from your nle and import into the flash 8 video encoder. You can spec the output size in the encoder. The new codex looks really nice and can be compressed quite a bit before artifacts start showing up.
I have a 3 minute, 8 minute, and 43 minute videos on my website if you want to take a peek, all the encoding was from flash 8, On2 codex.
Hope this helps some,
Jon

http://fotgfilms.com

Nice one Jon,

I am quite stuck here so it is nice to get your reply.

Is there any particular settings on the AVI output as I am aware that Premiere 2 offers several billion options. I have tried outputing direct from premiere as a flash file but it was not good (tried all setting combinations possible).

Another question if I may be so checky - when i add any graphics from photoshop they look really duff when the size is altered, what are your thoughts on this?

Thanks again

Sorenson 4.3
 

Hi Jon

Sorenson 4.3 does a very nice job in compressing for flash. You have a lot of choices: Macromedia Flash Video (.flv) 512K looks pretty good. Don't fiddle with the graphix. Just cut them into the piece and then compress the whole thing. It is pretty uncomplicated and works well on the web.

Jack Hubbard

Thanks Jon,

I did what you said and it all worked superbly.

Thanks for your help with this.

Alex

Jon,

Are your video's streamed on your website?

I'm using Sorenson Squeeze 4.2. Fabulous and very userfriendly.

The link below shows a muskox-footage. The original avi file was 269MB, compressed to flash: 9MB, frame size 640x360

http://www.video-film.no/snutter/muskox.html

Hmm, that's really odd. I just tried encoding a Flash video from Premiere Pro 2.0, and frankly, I was impressed. The quality was superb. I used the "FLV8 NTSC 400k" preset. The only thing I altered was to change the frame width and height to 320x240 on the "Video" tab.

It probably is fine.

You how when things don't work then everything seems to go wrong (usually its then time to go to bed and try again with a fresh head).

I think i am getting my thoughts around this now so now we are just battling with flash!

Of course that's an issue for another forum.....

I don't know, either, but I do know that when encoding for Flash 8 video Premiere Pro 2.0 uses the On2 VP6 codec, and for Flash 7 video it uses the Sorenson Spark codec.

Tell me about it! I've been there, alright.