Novice needs advice on web delivery
 

Hey folks - just published a website which includes a gallery of clips from my wedding work. I've rendered my HD clips in Vegas to wmv files. The clips run 2-4 minutes in length and the file size is about 100mb for the longest clip. The longest clips take about a minute to load before they play- too long I think for any prospective customer to wait. The problem is that Windows Media player does not even give you a status indicator to let you know it's still loading. I have inserted a message that says "please wait for movie to load" but really looking for a better solution. Any recommendations on best vehicle to use for this? I am on a budget so I didn't want to spend a lot of dough for a flash encoder. Is H.264 a better solution? I can encode to MPG-4 in Vegas 7. Then I'm told I can make this a mov. file with the $29 Quicktime Pro upgrade. Also, I'm using Yahoo sitebuilder for my website platform which supports Windows Media Player and Quicktime - not sure about Flash. Basically looking for best bang for the buck until I can afford an upgrade to my website. Any help appreciated.

Art
http://vargaproductions.com/

WMV is your best option if you need to reach the most prospective clients delivering the highest quality at the given bitrate. Flash has the best player presence (as high as 99% according to some stats) but the format is weaker, so is QT - on top of that the QT player is buggy on PCs and most work computer users can't even install it (for security reasons installation of software is prohibited).

I suspect your bitrate is way too high, that's why the buffering time is long. Try encoding no higher than around 500 Kbps.

Shoot me a PM if you need some help; take a look at www.dialogcuviata.com and watch at least a minute or two - if you like it, I give you the know-how. What I have there is a full hour of video and only 220 MB file size.

Hi
I like the way your video looks. What were you settings?

Settings
 

The video is 480x360 pixels @ 448 Kbps, audio is 64 Kbps - total 512 Kbps. I resize the video in VirtualDub prior to encoding to wmv - no one encoder I tested so far does a good job resizing video.