Best way to show clip on your website?
 

Hello Everyone...I realize this is probably a very basic question. But I'm in the process of creating my website, with several video clips. My main question is...is it possible to somehow use my AVI clips directly to the website, or should I first render them as MPEG 2 clips? I don't want to compress the clips too much, they were mainly shot with a JVC 250.;
or will AVI clips take up way too much bandwith. The clips are HDV, downconverted to DV, & are all about a minute in length. As you can tell, I'm a newbie when it comes to getting clips on line!!

Any help/ideas would be greatly appreciated...

Hi Pete
For most people to be able to watch your clips via your website you are going to have to compress them fairly heavily..
The easiest way by far is to upload them to either Vimeo or Exposure Room... the HD options are paid for but will give you optimal quality for minimal headache...

I use standard Vimeo for most of my stuff and the quality is pretty good.

Regards
Gareth

If you are encoding your own website, you could easily either use .flv for embedded in the page.

And you could also use .mov which when they click it, the movie will pop up in a new window on a white background.

For example if i use Vegas8?I should render in which template?

thx

If by template you mean quad or duo, it would not matter as much as the total CPU output. The main thing, the division of the cores does, is enable multitasking better. So if you're only running Vegas 8. It would not matter for multitasking purposes, as you are only striving for pure output power, which the 2.8Ghz is superior then the 2.0 Ghz.

But say you will want to be watching video's online, while talking on msn, while listing to iTunes, while doing homework, the quad core in that case would be better, as it is able to handle multitasking better.

But the difference between like a 2.8ghz duo core and a 2.8 ghz quad core is not that different when just doing a single powerful thing like rendering a video. The big difference is when u have a 2.8Ghz vs a 2.0 Ghz.

Thx Brad and happy Easter!

Marcus, if rendering directly from Vegas is your only option, then I would render as WMV. WMV is a Microsoft format, but I believe it plays in Mac browsers (a Mac user can pop in and confirm or deny.) I don't really like the way Vegas renders QuickTime.

WMV is easy to embed in your HTML code with just a few lines. Just google "WMV embed".

Personally, I don't render direct from Vegas to an online format. I either convert in QuickTime Pro (for H.264), or use Adobe Flash Encoder (for FLV.)

WMV is very chancy for Mac. Many mac users don't want any part of microsoft, and on principle won't download the plugin. MS finally gave up (edit:gave up releasing new player versions for mac) and now supports flip4mac technology, but wmv still doesn't have much penetration with mac (and linux).

I'm with Chris on this one. Flash, flash, flash, online video is all about flash at the moment, mostly because with the VP6 codec we finally got acceptable picture quality for the bitrate, and, flash video is the most cross-plaform/cross-browser online delivery format.

I just converted an HD video using the .f4v/H.264 format available in Adobe Encoder CS4. I am very impressed. Much better than the .flv files I was creating in CS3.

Question:is Adobe Flash Encoder (for FLV.) free?

I use just Vegas and i don't know how to get a video 2 be uploaded on a site!Thx

MM

No, it's not free. It comes with other Adobe products, like Premiere Pro, After Effects, etc.

There are several free flash video encoders available online, I think Riva is a very popular one.

We need to distinguish between the flash codecs:

Spark - the original flash video codec. Substandard quality for the bitrate. Free.
VP6 - the codec that made flash video roughly equivalent to WMV in quality for bitrate. Not free.
MP4/h.264 - the quality leader, open standard codec. Free mostly.

Freeware encoders, such as Riva and Super-C (which is better, I think), will encode to spark or MP4.

The VP6 codec is only available in Adobe Flash Video Encoder, Sorenson Squeeze Pro, On2 Flix Encoder. Most of these cost hundreds of US dollars, but there are several versions of Flix, including a $40 version that includes the codec.

Spark is unacceptable performance in a professional environment, at least by today's standards.
VP6 is really good performance, on par with anything out there.
MP4/h.264 is marginally better performance than VP6, however, not all viewers will have the same experience of a given h.264 stream, since it has a very high decode complexity, meaning greater processor load.

The meaningful measure of any of these codecs is "quality for a given bitrate". MP4 is a little bit of a special case, because of the decode complexity. There's no simple answer on what machines we leave behind with MP4 - it depends.

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