OT: VASST on YouTube!!
 

Wow! What a great idea! Check out these links:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eX0PaxBfp6c
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RVKEDXLvVeQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ezNhytmcCak

There are two sessions for how to use stock footage, and one on a video ediitor master class. Very cool.

Randy

Randy,

Thanks for the tip! DSE's discussion of using Artbeats was very interesting and helpful.

Dave

Great links thanks a lot. These are only fueling my desire to buy some of the Vegas VASST productions. doh

jason

While in YouTube, if you click on VASST you'll find a few more tutorials. Hmmm, I guess I now have a reason to go to YouTube occasionally.

The other two are:
How HDV works
Shot Transitions on the Sony Z1/FX1 Camcorders

Thanks VASST!

Your welcome. I sure think this is a great idea, not just for advertising products but for giving out hints and tips, kinda supporting everyone with an interest in video. The YouTube phenonomenum reaches so many. What a great medium to share information and tell others about cool products.
Randy

OK. How the heck did they encode that stuff to get such a high quality. I have been testing various sizes and data rates and nothing comes out that good!

Vegas, baby!
custom template after a bit of experimenting and a lotta years of encoding.
Personally, I'm not pleased with it, but in a few days...you'll see it much better if some of what we're working on pans out.

Why is it some videos get thousands of hits on utube? Is there a way to promote a video there?

Give us a break Spot! I would buy a copy of Vegas if that were the only way, but even then I would need more information.

I can send perfect files and they mess them up. Please, please tell us the frame size and file format you send them. Or, do they let you encode your own under some sort of producer's agreement?

I use procoder. here's what the results look like, look at it for about a minute til the second interview starts.

http://tinyurl.com/y85lju

Brian,

Some of that looks good, other parts not so good (in the beginning).

What frame size did you submit at what data rate and which codec?

My problem is that no matter what I submit, no matter how great it looks on my PC, it gets corrupted into miserable video by YouTube. SO I don't bother to use YouTube, but I would like to, if I can overcome their re-encoding problems.

Steven, what format are you submitting? Encoded by what tool? I know in the past you've been a monster advocate for Premiere; if that's the case you'll never get the encode you want. Adobe just (currently) isn't into encoding well, not even for DVD.
Start with 320 x 240.
Saturate colors by a little, add a tad of sharpness. It'll look horrible on your monitor. If you know that Youtube is going to reduce quality by say...25% in a specific direction, you can offset that by increasing those specific quality parameters by 25% before uploading.
I'm using MPEG 4 as my upload codec, but as mentioned, I've got a few tweaks. Vegas also has some under-the-hood features that help. You can really mess Vegas up if you don't know the under-the-hood features. Once I've got it to where I'm totally satisfied, then I'll post results.
I'm not trying to be cagey, really. It's that I feel I'm still stumbling in the dark, so no point in leading others if I'm going down the wrong road.

Yeah for the beginning i wanted the pixelated look (I made the doc for a med school) which looks cool in full rez and then with the drug dealer I was trying to overcome environmental limitations and camera issues.
Here's a commercial i did with a beta cam.

http://tinyurl.com/yc6anx

I used procoder express actually. I rendered as an avi file in vegas 6, imported to procoder, it just said "video for web" and used the 256kbps for web server. I'm not sure what resolution I think either 384x288 or 320x240. Pro coder express doesn't really tell you precisely.

the 7 min doc was 11 megs when i uploaded it and the caveman scene was 1.5 megs before upload.

I'm not tech savvy as you can tell but I know procoder always gets rave reviews from users.

Spot,

I actually did what they suggested. I bought a copy of DivX Pro and submitted 320X240. Premiere Pro won't export MPEG4, but I have tried with Quicktime Pro as well as other applications. It all looks great on my PC, just not after they mess it up.

I was not happy with any of my submissions. I wrote to them and they responded with:

"We recommend the MPEG4 (Divx, Xvid) format at 425x350 resolution with MP3 audio. Resizing your video to these specifications before uploading will help your clips look better on YouTube. "

That didn't help either. It is different than what they recommend on the web site, so I thought maybe it was a great tip. I don't mean that it looks any worse than the average video, just that it looks as bad. Not as good as yours, in other words.

I really appreciate the tip on the saturation and sharpness. I will work on that and see if I can get better results.

If you do come up with a format and procedure that you are reasonably proud of, please let everyone know. I imagine that much of what you come up with will apply to many encoders, not just inside Vegas.

Life would be easier if they let us encode our own to Flash limited by whatever rules they reuire.

Bear in mind that Vegas has proprietary tools for encoding to MP4 for PSP...that's the beginning point for my workflow. If you've ever seen how HD looks on a PSP....wow.
I don't know why they recommend DivX, outside of Videomaker recommending DivX for this stuff. DivX to Flash just doesn't work well with their encoders, as you've found.

I have a Video iPod that I bought just to see some video podcasts and to see what my podcast would look like on an iPod, and it turns out that it is a simple matter of having Quicktime do the job for you.

I have never seen a PSP. I know, I lead a sheltered life in a community of mostly retired people.

I would not object to getting a copy of Vegas just for this purpose if I really needed YouTube. But I would be more inclined to pick up Sorenson Squeeze or Procoder to get more than one task out of it.

Here a video that I uploaded to youtube and I am satisfied with considering how poor quality youtube is . It is about 40mb for 5 minutes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEE7ORJCS9c

I think I could eek out a little more quality if I had to. Setting were as follows in Quicktime Pro.

Compression H264
Quality - high
Key Frame rate - 24
Encoding pass -2
Dimension 320x240
Audio AAC
Sample rate 48,000
Bitrate 128 kbs

Hope this helps.....

Mark,

You are right. That's not bad at all. Well done. I will investigate that method as well.

Nicely done, and the quality looks very good too.

Very nice looking video on youtube
 

Just went to check out some things and on the top page this video > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvWdkz8Ra54 < When the colors come out, looks great... although, not much movement. Actually all the Mr. Diety vids look great... wonder what his methods are...???

Besides being some of the funniest material I have seen in years, the videos really do have a great visual quality to them. Even the white text on black background looks fine.

Some people obviously know the secret. I am just not one of those people.

Steven,

Yea, their quality is much superior to what I came up with. There is some elusive "sweet spot" they are using. I am not giving up and am going to keep on experimenting. I think their titles are cleaner because they are using big blocky letters.

Regards

If anybody...
 

Ever comes up with the formula to make vegas timeline renders come out > then youtubed out like Mr. Diety flash files ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvWdkz8Ra54 ) please... please fill us in on the ingredients.

I would be happy to put a link on my web page, complete with a picture and a bio, of anyone who comes up with a great formula. You get credit and the adoration of millions of fans around the world.

This question of youtube is interesting. I do correspondent work for Rocketboom, and they are crazy into apples - which makes me a little nuts. But I have found that it's really best if I render to AVI first - using the "getting ready for web compression" setting.

Then I take that and turn it into a .FLV file. Yep, I have found that Flash gives me the most control, and looks the best - not the best when blown up to gigantic TV size, but for web size stuff, it seems to hold up the best.

I used the Vegas QT encoder, and it doesn't make it. I bought the Nero 7 ultra, and did the H.264 thing. Still didn't work. Then I discovered that the only way that I could do QT in anyway that really worked was to do it on an apple. Just seems the only thing that works.

But I would check out Flash 8. for web encoding.
Milt Lee

Milt,

If YouTube allowed us to encode our own material it would be great. But they don't allow us to submit Flash.

They have us submit 320X240 but the default is to show it bigger than that which makes it look bad.

There are just so many things wrong, and yet they have a huge following.

Ah..... what a crock!

Oh well, it is fairly terrible.