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How would you do it?
How would you handle this? I have several reporters who have just been issued Canon HG10 AVCHD cameras. We want to file news stories for web posting. They will be editing on laptops with Premiere Elements, and send back the stories on whatever broadband connection they can find (most often hotel room). Videos will likely be in the five minute range. So the question – how much compression and what format would you use on the video to get the best compromise between file size and quality? I want to have enough “head room” so that I can do final edits, drop in graphics, etc and then compress to Flash for the web. We post our videos at 320×180 at about 500 mbps.
(We’re shooting HD to have the better quality for subsequent projects).
Thanks for the suggestions.
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10 Replies
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I would probably lean towards Quicktime Photo-jpeg, but given the connection speeds I’ve seen in hotel rooms, it will still take a while…
Vince Becquiot
Director | EditorKaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
Premiere Elements – hmm. I hope it has been improved since the last time I used it.
Are the reporters going to FTP the files back to you for polishing, and then you do the uploading?
Are these reporters in the US? If so you might think about laptop broadband service, to bypass the shoddy hotel internet service Vince mentioned. -
They’ll be doing both. Some videos I won’t need to touch; they’ll go straight to the web and I’ve already created a preset in Elements that will encode the video the way we need it. (I picked elements because we are PC based, I know Premiere well, and cost)
Many more, however, will require touch up on my part, which is why I think I need to have them encoded at a higher quality than what my final output will be. I’ve just loaded CS4 and found out it will handle .flv files natively. Is there a way to re-export a .flv file from Premiere without compressing it again? That would be the best solution; the reporters could send the file in the final resolution and then I could take to the web or tweak it first as needed.
Most of the time they will be in U.S. My past experience with wireless broadband on the cell system has been that, as miserable as hotel systems can sometimes be, they still have been faster for upload. But maybe the 3g networks have improved in the last six months.
Thanks for the suggestions.
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“Is there a way to re-export a .flv file from Premiere without compressing it again? ”
Anytime you make an adjust to a media clip (via your touch up edits) you’re essentially creating new frames that didn’t exist before, and thus will need to be re-encoded/compressed again, thus quality will suffer a bit.
I’m not sure, but for speed of transfer sake, you might look into solutions like:
Digital Rapids: Copper
Digidesign: Digidelivery
Not sure if they’ll help, but work a google.
hope this helps,
Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX
Younversity TV
http://www.youniversity.tv -
It might be a good idea to scope out Kinkos around the country and use their bandwidth.
FLV sounds like the wrong format for editing – it is highly compressed to begin with, although the new f4v is basically h.264 with a different file extension.
Are your YouTube videos going to be HD?
I think the uploading is going to be a bigger problem than video formats. -
Assuming it is available in Elements, I still think using Adobe Media Encoder > Quicktime > Photo-Jpeg (with a quality setting between 60 and 100 %) will get you the best quality vs size, especially when you need to bring it back in for edit.
Since this is going to the web, you should probably stick with an SD timeline on the first edit and export.
Remember, resolution isn’t everything. The compression you would have to impose on HD to make it small enough to upload really defies the purpose. You will get much better quality using SD with manageable upload times (at least in the 5 minutes range).
Good luck in your venture.
Vince Becquiot
Director | EditorKaptis Studios
San Francisco – Bay Area -
H.264 between 1.5 and 3MB/sec VBR at double your final frame size – 5 min would be less than 175MB (from memory – so test it.) Or why not export them as full frame AVCHD? 5 minutes is maybe 300MB? Could upload in a couple hours.
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Matter of transfer time and practicallity. On a fast, stable connection, I’d be happy to do it that way. But most of the time, these guys will be in a hotel room. My experience has been that the sometimes crummy connections available will crash on multi-hour file uploads.
But I may have stumbled upon a solution. In CS4, you can import a flash file and edit it natively. I can take .flv files that have been compressed to their final size for display on our web site, and as long as I don’t render the timeline, I can re-export the .flv with edits and graphics added without a noticeable degradation. Render the timelime and it looks like what my dog threw up. I don’t pretend to understand how it works, but somehow it seems to.
Thanks to the suggestions from all.
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The degredation might be due to the fact that the rendering while working in Premiere is using a different codec from the FLV file itself.
Interesting that Flash appears to be optimized for multi generational rendering. So it holds up under export in this case.
Great info to know….
Thanks,
Alex Udell
Editing, Motion Graphics, and Visual FX
Younversity TV
http://www.youniversity.tv -
let me be clear — I’m looking at small, highly compressed files to begin with – 360×180 pixels. and it only seems to work if you use a “same as source” setting in Encoder. Your results may very
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