I can’t sleep (and someone out there will know exactly why:) and thought that I would spend a minute talking about some of the different compression settings we use at FuddyTV.com. In our infancy when we first started Fuddy the biggest challenge was getting the videos to be great quality, but also a small file size that wouldn’t kill a computer, take forever to load and not play so choppy. You’ll see that some of the videos are still like that, but I am slowly going back and recompressing them so they don’t play so poorly.
All of the videos are first edited by Dave or Erik and then sent to myself for music and graphics. The difficult part is that they use a Mac and I have a good ol’ PC. This causes a problem, because instead of being able to bring in the original file and edited version, they must compress it to a .mov file before I can touch it. Eventually this will change, but in the meantime that’s what we’ve got to deal with.
So when I get a no-very-compressed .mov file which can sometimes be greater that 1GB, I add the music, graphics and then must conform the video to fit within the specifications our video host Brightcove requires. Basically it goes from a 720×480 to a 480×360 and I encode it to the FLV format which is by far the best format for online video. If we want to upload some of our videos to YouTube we have to encode it to the .mov or .wmv format, but this can be a challenge. YouTube allows you only a maximum of 100MB per video and it compresses that using its own system. Sometimes this is good, sometimes it is bad. Often I find its a bit of a crap shoot, and when I’ve used the settings dictated by YouTube, it comes out pretty crappy (see this one for instance). What’s nice about Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 is that you directly encode to FLV and MOV, but I find it still has some work to do.
Here’s the settings I most frequently use for FLV files:
Choose Adobe Flash
Video Codec On2 VP6
Encode Alpha Channel
Width 480
Height 360
Frame Rate 29.97 fps
Bitrate 600 kbps
Audio:
Stereo
Bitrate 128 kbps
So essentially we went from a 1GB file to a file size of 62.83MB…not bad for a 12 minute video! The quality is still there with minimal loss of clarity and the sound is still crisp enough, and the music is good. Obviously it can be good to play around with different settings, but all in all these ones are pretty good. The rule of thumb is the less compression the better, meaning the less times you compress something, the better it will be. If I took the file and compressed it multiple time, the quality would be shoddy, but when I compress it only once or twice it holds its quality and allows us to have a smaller file size.
So there you go, there’s a little insight into exactly how decent compression is done.
/End geek post…
Cheers,
Ryan for Fuddy
