looking for best conversion from HD to .flv
 

Hi all,

Sorry if i mistakenly posted part of this message already.

I have a 4 minute 30 second video shot in 1080I HD that was suppose to only be for a Foundation's board of trustee presentation. Having seen the final cut the client now wants to put it on their web site.

We have tested various conversions and the best we have so far is converting the 911 meg HD version to a 33 meg .flv file with Sorenson Spark. The client's web site is only operating with Flash 7 and they don't want to upgrade to 8 right now.

I just want to be sure there's not a conversion we're missing that would work better. The results with Spark are the best we've had yet but I want to make sure there's not a better solution before we go "live"
Thanks,
Roger

You can get some pretty nice quality/filesize ratios with H.264. To see examples, go to Apple's website and view some of the HD movie trailers. H.264 is supported with any current version of the free QT player on each platform.

The encode times are lengthy, but the results are pretty nice.

-gb-

Thanks Greg, we'll test it and post the results.
Roger

Roger - Greg is definitely right with regard to H264 providing the best quality footage at the same bit rate compared to Flash's encode. The only thing I would pay attention to is that all H264 footage will require Quicktime 7, which has a lower install rate on computers than Flash 8. So you'll still be faced with people having to install new/updated software. For what it's worth, I prefer H264/Quicktime, but sometimes it's just nice to have the video nicely wrapped inside of Flash for a seamless interactive piece. The Flash 8 Video Coder (On2 VP6) also provides dramatically better quality and lower file sizes compared to Flash 7's Sorenson Spark.

http://www.adobe.com/products/player...netration.html

You might try On2 Technologies Flix (www.on2.com) -- they built the codec for Flash. I'm very happy with their compression.

I've found that using FlashMX compatible compression gets more viewers than 7 or 8, even though the quality is better in later versions.

You'll have to experiment to find the magic combo of size, bitrate, and frame rate for your particular footage -- it varies depending on movement, noise, and complexity.

I love H264 compression, too, but a lot of people refuse to install iTunes to get QT7.

Chuck

I'm with Chuck on this.. On2 is simply amazing!

I found this on wiki btw..

On August 20, 2007, Adobe announced on its blog that with Update 3 of the Flash Player (currently in beta), Flash Video will also support the MPEG-4 international standard.

Ponderous things for the future!

I am currently testing playback of MPEG-4/H.264 in Flash 9 beta (v.9.0.64.0) available here.

I find it works well - see the right hand clip here (requires the above Flash version, and the left hand clip requires QT7, for comparison). Note that both players are playing the same H.264 video media file!.........but..........

.........only in Windows XP or Vista. On any Mac browser, the right hand clip shows a fat green stripe down the side and poor colour registration. Any ideas or suggestions gratefully received!? TIA.

(I have asked Adobe Flash beta support.)

In answer to the OP's question, it would now be worth investigating H.264 (as Greg suggested) but now: played back in Flash 9 - many video-on-the-web providers are all migrating there.

I don't know if your still looking, but if you have only one video to convert to flv, I would not buy a program. I use HD-Tube.com I have converted videos greater than 1 gig on there site. The process they use really keeps the visual quality while compressing the file size. They have HD x264 and ON 2 V6 and other options for conversion if you need even lower quality for lower bit rate such as dialup quality.