Whats the best CURRENT option for web delivery

[Mark Harmer]

Hi Doug and Jon - thanks for your comments on my piece on Stage6. It was originally something I did to test out my set of Dedolights, but in the end I decided to post it in both SD and HD formats. Slowly getting better at Vegas...!

I have had similar issues with WMV but I was just about to suggest the Windows Media Encoder too - only Seth snuck in first!!!

[Kevin Shaw]

Originally Posted by Seth Bloombaum

Most often used for downloadable video - Quicktime.

That might have been true at some point but doesn't appear to be the case now. Flash seems to rule lately, and someone from Flip4Mac said a while back that WMV has passed Quicktime in terms of new video uploads. Personally I find WMV to be easiest to use until I get the hang of Flash.

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

Flash is by far the front runner with WMV trailing.
www.streamingmedia.com has fairly up to date info that they post regularly.
YouTube alone, seriously skews any results for streaming media, however.

[Jason Robinson]

Originally Posted by Douglas Spotted Eagle

Flash is by far the front runner with WMV trailing.
www.streamingmedia.com has fairly up to date info that they post regularly.
YouTube alone, seriously skews any results for streaming media, however.

It would be good to see what the "non-user generated content" web sites use for video as that should more accurately represent content creators. YouTube users don't have a choice (and generally have no clue) regarding what video codec is being used for their cell phone lip sync video.

jason

[Danny Fye]

Originally Posted by Alastair Brown

My head is ready to explode trying to figure out which method of delivery is most suited to my needs.

I want quick start streaming playback, and highquality with small file size.

Some guys seem to be able to get REALLY nice looking compressed footage which I'm struggling to replicate even if I use the same frame sizes, frame rates and any combination of settings.

At the moment, I'm encoding using wmv and Quick Time.

Thanks In Advance!

I am using WMV.

Settings are:

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Video rendering quality: Good
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Audio = CBR with attributes of 22 kbps, 22 khz, stereo (A/V) CBR
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Video Settings =

Mode: Quality VBR
Image size: Animation (320x240)
Pixel aspect ratio: 1.333 (HD 1080)
Frame rate (fps): 30.000 seconds per keyfram: 3
Quality: 90%

The VBR setting means I don't have to fiddle with the bit rate settings.
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Even though the pixel aspect ratio is 1.333 (HD 1080) I can use this setting with SD wide screen with no problems. If I set the attributes of the video events so as not to maintain aspect ratio there will be no black bars on the top and bottom of the videos. Since I don't embed the videos I don't really need this. Render times with no filters is a little faster than real time on most files. Depends on the video itself.

If you want to see examples of my videos simply go to www.vidmus.com/scolvs and view them.

One thing I like about wmv is that it is easy to download the videos and view them off-line. With flash it may be possible but I can't seem to find a way to do so. Maybe the sites I visit don't want this? Saves repeat bandwidth use when one wants to view the files again later on.

So far I get great quality, reasonable file sizes and I can do it all from the Vegas time-line and not have to do the extra steps that flash would require.

Danny Fye
www.dannyfye.com
www.vidmus.com/scolvs

[Ken Diewert]

Originally Posted by Doug Quance

Great piece, Mark. Nicely done, indeed.

I am looking closer at divx for a better way to deliver higher quality online... and there's no doubt that divx can deliver it.

Agreed, I've used DivX since I first heard of it last year... how many people will install the player? I'd love for a Stage6 type platform to replace youtube.

I do use it to compress .avi before sending them to youtube. The results are pretty good, though it means an extra step.

[Andrew Bower]

Originally Posted by Seth Bloombaum

This is a Vegas issue, not a Windows Media issue. To correctly flag widescreen, try the freeware Windows Media Encoder from Microsoft, which exposes more controls than Vegas does.

You'll get no templates, but a lot more control. Quality is the same, as Vegas' WM encoding is built upon the Windows Media SDK.

I actually was able to do this right from Vegas, but I needed to set the pixel size to 1.212 and then set the image size to 360x240 to match the screen size. It actually turned out rather nice.
OK, thinking back , I am not sure if those are the absolute correct numbers, but I made it work by setting up a 'custom' render setting for WMV and changed the pixel size and image size settings. That machine is currently rendering so I can't check the numbers... ;)

Andrew

[Andrew Bower]

Originally Posted by Jason Robinson

It would be good to see what the "non-user generated content" web sites use for video as that should more accurately represent content creators.

Digital Juice has tons of great "how-to" videos available for download and one of them talks specifically about how they get such killer quality for their web videos. If you haven't watched these before, you are in for a treat. Go back through their archives and check out some of their videos. Then look at this one to see how they do it:
http://www.digitaljuice.com/djtv/seg...searchid=16522

Enjoy!

Andrew

[Alastair Brown]

Anybody care to share the "magic ingrediants" that go into making a flash movie that will stream smoothly.

Interested in what playback rate you are using and what frame size.

[Michael Daul]

I use 15fps and 320x240 - seems to work great...

[Emre Safak]

Halving the frame rate helps immeasurably. Jerky motion is preferable to blocky frames.

[Douglas Spotted Eagle]

We use the iPod template with a couple alterations, but at 30fps, it goes nicely to YouTube. We've deeply compared 1Mbps iPod template with 1Mbps WMV template, and the MP4 gives a better conversion to Flash, but it's mostly noticeable in gradients, not hard contrasts.

[Alastair Brown]

Originally Posted by Douglas Spotted Eagle

We use the iPod template with a couple alterations, but at 30fps, it goes nicely to YouTube. We've deeply compared 1Mbps iPod template with 1Mbps WMV template, and the MP4 gives a better conversion to Flash, but it's mostly noticeable in gradients, not hard contrasts.

Oh...now thats raised another question. I was going on the basis that I should try and work from the original source file which in this case was a widescreen avi, which I then converted to 480 x 270 flv file.
Am I picking you up right that you convert to ipod mp4 first, then convert this to flv?
Obviously there is a reason for this, I'm just thinking that you are compressing an already compressed file rather than a higher quality original.

Am I missing something?

112, 256, 384, 512, 756, 1Mb....so many streaming rates to choose from! In a non scaleable 480 x 270 window, 256 is looking pretty good in my book, and, with the lousy download speeds over here (supposed 8Mb connection giving downstream off 300k) , I have more chance of it streaming.

What would you say was the most common streaming rate to use?

[Alessandro Machi]

Hi, I am a DP on a super-8 film.
Very short clips can be found on www.dalidalidali.com
Or you can skip and go directly to the longest of the clips

http://www.turpasilhouette.com/trailer.html

I'd like feedback on how it plays back, loading time, clarity, ect.

Thanks in advance!

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I have to apologize, I did a topic search and this topic seemed the perfect one to post my question on and Now I realize it is under the vegas video forum and not the web delivery forum.

sorry about that, however, how does the image hold up, sync, do you see dropped any dropped frames?

[Jon Fairhurst]

At ColonelCrush we use Sorenson Squeeze at 480x272 to make Flash flv files. Music is important to us, so we go with 128 kbps stereo audio and 360 kbps video. For episodes with muzzle flashes and fast action, we render at 30 fps. (We shoot 30p.) Otherwise we would sometimes miss critical frames. For slower stuff, we go with 15 fps.

One thing to be aware of is that lots of compressors crush the blacks to lower noise, so they can allocate the bits to the bright areas. We often shoot dark scenes, and this kills everything in the shadows. I'd much rather have noise in the blacks than no dark content at all!

Our fix is to render out an AVI with the brightness pushed up by 11% and the contrast reduced by 11%. The flv rendered by Sorenson then matches the original edit reasonably well.

Here's our latest example, including dark content, muzzle flashes and stereo music: http://colonelcrush.com/movie/index/00220501 We're pleased with the quality vs. bandwidth that we've been able to achieve - even with this challenging content.

BTW, if you choose Windows Media, Mac people will give you (well deserved) hell. Many film, video, music and advertising people use Macs, so Macs should be respected.

Nobody has ever complained to us about using Flash. If they don't have the plugin, then they have made the limiting choice, not us.