Optimum workflow for web delivery
 

Sorry - if this is more appropriate for the Web Delivery forum but wanted to get feedback specifically from Vegas users. What would anyone recommend for creating wmv files to post on my website. They are all 2-3 minute wedding clips. I want the highest quality possible but don't want them to take too long to load. I'm thinking that 20-30mb may be the highest I'd want to go for file size. I'm starting with HD files on a 24p timeline. I'm still new to all the different options - framerate, bitrate, vbr, cbr, etc. I can't afford to go to flash at this point so if someone could share something that is working for them I'd be very greatful.

Art

I'm not sure what you are using to play your videos, but one way to go is to get vPIP - you can find it at http://vpip.org and download it for free. This is a embed widget that you can put on your website, that allows you to play about 10 different video formats. I personally encode most of my stuff to 3 basic formats - flash - wmv and mov for quicktime. I think this covers most everything. If you are shooting weddings, then you really ought to think about getting the flash encoder from macromedia or the swish encoder from swish - something - google swishmax 2.

As to using WMV - sure why not - it looks pretty good and with vpip you can show whatever size you choose - you encode it at whatever size you want. Basically you have several choices so it's all about compromises. If you go for a bigger show size - 640x480 then to keep you videos down to 9 or 10 mb, you will have to sacrifice bitrate, which means less quality. But you could go for 400x300 or 525x350 and still have a pretty great bitrate. I have noticed that all of the codecs seem to think sound quality doesn't matter so their default sound setting generally suck, but you can bring it back up without any big whoop in terms of size of the final file.

Honestly I've used Vegas for 5 or 6 years (since V4) and I still am not that blown over by the Quicktime codecs. Maybe I don't know how to choose the right settings or the right codec in the first place. Anyway - way too much info.
Milt Lee

For .wmv, I like to use 2-pass VBR at about 640x480. Seems to be the best bang for the buck.

Thanks for the feedback. I think I'm going to go with 400X300 for size. My site is hosted by Yahoo so I don't have control over any of the player settings other than size, and which player ( Real, Quicktime and WMP). Does VBR yield better quality or file size over CBR?. Also is it better to render an intermediate file ( AVI) from my Vegas project first then put that into a new project re-render to wmv? If so, any recommended codecs or settings for the intermediate?

Art