No, to go to the web with this great project....
 

So excited, just got my music video back from editing and it's great, all shot with the XLS1, my first real project with this cam. Wonderful. would have paid twice as much. So now i would like to encode for the web and could use some tips. What's the best way to do this? I know some about web authoring, and I have just about everytool that I can think of, but none of which will encode a 4 minute video down to a reasonable size and retain all the quality. Where should i start? I have canopus 1.5, premiere pro loaded and use that for other things, and the entire Dreamweaver suite. Also, do people post thier work somewhere here for critique? I am looking for some advice before starting on my next music video....thanks!!!
jigs

Hey Jiggy,

I can't really help you with your question, but I think you would better ask one of the moderators to remove this thread to somewhere in the editing or premiere pro message board, maybe you'll have more response there.

I have one answer for you: Yes, you have the message boards that are called DV FOR THE MASSES. There you can put your work up, I mean a link, and hope to get response :-)

Good luck, congratulations with your first project.

thanks Mathieu, i appreciate the support and ur right, duh, what do camera people know about this...like the blind leading the blind. i am really just a poet, but i got sucked into this digital cameraguy/website programmer/content producer thang. so many hats, not enough head.
jigs

You're the next shakespeare, man ;-)

Moving this to the Web/DVD section would help...

You want "4 minute video down to a reasonable size and retain all the quality"... at what resolution? What file size do you consider reasonable? Are you targeting users with broadband only? Do you want to stream, embed the video in the page, or click to download?

Give some more detail and there are lots of people who will give suggestions... but what encoder do you have? Windows Media? QuickTime?

There are a few pieces of software out there which range from inexpensive to moderate.
The least expensive professional solution and simplest option I would recommend is Sorenson Squeeze 4 for Flash MX. It is $99 bucks and has drag-and-drop simplicity. You can build the .swf file into a webpage pretty easy.
Here is an example of the output with little my baby girl - she'll be famous one day :)
Usually I do QuickTime, but some of the family complained they didn't have it - wake up call.
Take a look at Amazon.com's Theatre, they have it right, and they should for all the $$$ they have.
Encode in .SWF, build it into a web page.

Or:

Give the viewer many options if they do not have Flash.
(See the bottom of their movie pages with links to the same movie in Real, QuickTime and Windows Media) Nobody wants to download a new plug-in or version of Real- don't force them, you will have frustrated web site viewers - let them choose if the .SWF doesn't work.

Sorenson Squeeze Compresssion Suite allows you to do QuickTime with high quality 2-pass VBR (variable bit rate encoding). Plus Real on the Mac and Windows Media 9 and Real on the PC version.

Hope this helps,

thanks to u all!
 

Well, after doing some research and reading your comments i loaded canopus procoder 1.5 that uses the sorenson 3 codec and created a test .mov file. I used the lowest quality setting to get the file size down to 7megs for a 4 minute video at 12fps. Its from a TV broadcast and not the source tape, but it's a worst-case scenario test i guess (the video has gone back to editing for refinement). I've posted it here:

http://www.animalnepal.org/thevideo.htm

But it's hard to test at this end, my broadband is ancient and slow, and the audience is sitting in cyber cafes on shared modem lines. How does it look to u all, who i am sure are on superfast lines:)

The swf option is intriging...i have the entire MX series of dreamweaver softwares, will that help me, or do i need to get Squeeze? I was hoping procoder would do the trick...

Did you upload the video? The page loads with a broken QT movie icon and I tried loading the movie directly and didn't find it...

thanks so much for trying mark, there is some isp problem now with big files, trying to get ahold of them, ftp explorer sees the file on the server, but u are right, 404 error. they have a mirror in the usa, so maybe it takes a large file a long time to update? its really tough here, so many extra problems to overcome! i'll post again when fixed....

hello all! got the file on the server fixed but now it's taking forever to download, no streaming that i can see, and there are no controls, even though specified in the html:

<object classid="clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B" codebase="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab" width="190"height="158" standby="Aau Milli Gau Loading...">
<param name="SRC" value="aaumilligau3.mov">
<param name="AUTOPLAY" value="true">
<param name="CONTROLLER" value="true">
<embed src="aaumilligau3.mov" width="190" height="158" autoplay="true" controller="true" pluginspage="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/"></embed>
</object>
this has become perplexing, surely it's not this hard to get a movie on the web!

jigs

The code show your embedded size is too small. Your movie is 320x240 and you only gave it 190x158 to be viewed in... that's why you don't see the controller anywhere. Change your embed size to 320x250 or 320x260 to make sure you have extra space for the controller.

I got download speeds of about 50k per second... so it downloads pretty quickly.

The video is in MPEG4 and is 4.7MB... did you change the file? It looks okay, but there are lots of jaggies and pixelation going on. I would bet that Sorensen 3 would give you better results. Overall, good work with the video itself!

thanks mark! yeah, i have a host of other problems (some ISP related) but i did change the file - i used procoder with the sorenson 3 codec *but it's a SE version whatever that means? and THEN i ran the file thru QuicktimePRo to try and set the streaming bits, I guess it worked! but is that a miserable program or WHAT! but it was QTpro that made the video look jaggy (although reduced the size by a meg or so. i guess im on the right track however, thanks again for ur help.

if you insist on using qt, you'll need sorenson two-pass encoding capability to get a decent picture... i'm guessing here, but i think that comes with the sorenson pro codec, version 3.3(??)... just look for the two-pass option.