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Best way to FLV
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[Ed Dooley] “Have to agree with Sean and Chris. Walter, what are you smoking? 🙂
Flash is terrible for video? Remember all those people who would say “I made
a QuickTime and it looks terrible”?”We’ve been testing Flash for Video using Adobe’s Flash Encoder and not getting good results unless we up the data rate or choose to go with a Flash Media Server, ala disney.com’s website. So we’re staying with QT h.264 files.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
Read my Blog!
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[Sean ONeil] “Long ass paragraph, but that’s exactly what a PC user has to go through. Us Mac users may not always realize it.”
Gotta be honest and say I’ve never had a client, or anyone else, complain about having to install Quicktime Player on a PC, nor have they ever raised concerns about spyware or anything else.
Yes it’s incredibly stupid that Apple forces you to download iTunes at the same time and yes it’s longer to download both apps rather than a plug-in, but so far, no complaints and we only use Quicktime files for client reviews.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
Read my Blog!
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Our biggest problem with QT (and Flash for that matter) has been corporate IT people not allowing employees to install *anything* on their desktops. WMV9 has been the mainstay in those situations.
As for Flash quality, what about those amazing network Flash episodes? I think they look amazing, and I wish I could get my stuff to look like that (what? they spend thousands on lighting and they have better cameras? oh).
Walter, have you considered putting your H.264s in Flash yet, or are you waiting, as I am, for better Flash 9 penetration first?
Ed -
Wow, looks like we’ve generated a great deal of discussion.
To take this even further… it has brought up a new question that I thought I had answered long ago.
We currently shoot all video in our studio at 720 X 480, and everything ends up as on-line video. As I edit the video in Final Cut 6, I have the thin black edges on either side of the NTSC video. Now I have done plenty of research on that topic as to the difference between NTSC and PAL… so that is not what I’m about to ask about. Rather, in a simple persons terms… what should I do to get rid of the black edges, maintain the aspect ratio, and put the video on the web?
My procedure thus far:
Export the video at NTSCDV 640 X 480 (has been said to maintain the correct aspect ratio for web, as opposed to television. If for television then I leave it at 720 X 480)
Then, when encoding to an FLV I crop the edges off, and then to keep the entire dimensions the exact same I then lose 5 off top and bottom leaving me with the dimensions 627 X 470.Am I a complete failure to our industry? Naturally, I just want to do it the Right way! : )
Side note: Thank you ALL very much for your input! Let’s all team up and form a company bigger than Disney, and decide our own vacation days!
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[Ed Dooley] “As for Flash quality, what about those amazing network Flash episodes? I think they look amazing, and I wish I could get my stuff to look like that (what? they spend thousands on lighting and they have better cameras? oh).
Walter, have you considered putting your H.264s in Flash yet, or are you waiting, as I am, for better Flash 9 penetration first?”If you read my first response, the key to getting high quality video is Flash Media Servers. I asked my new website designer about this when we first started re-building our entire website in flash and I saw the super high quality video playing off Disney.com. From her:
“The graphical elements are mostly vector art created in Flash and their video is hosted on a Flash Media Server (FMS). Same with ABC, CBS and NBC sites… Flash Media Server. That’s the only way to get high-quality, smooth running Flash video.
There are streaming services with FMS installed that just host the flv files. That means you don’t have to install FMS on your server and you don’t have to move your web site. How it works is they convert the video to a high quality flv and host it on their server and provide us with a link to embed into the Flash file. It’s seamless, so the site visitor isn’t aware that the web site is coming from one remote server and the video is streaming from another.”
I’m not going to spend any money on a Flash Media Server service at this time as QT is working fine for us. My web designer has seen the same postings about h.264 supported by Flash 9 but can’t find anyone who’s actually been able to make this work or any sort of means to make this work. She has gone ahead and created an HTML page for our video samples for time being.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
Read my Blog!
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Export it with Current Settings, then crop all 4 sides. Be careful to take an even number off top and bottom though, to avoid switching fields. I usually do 4 off each side.
Ed[Ian Smith] “My procedure thus far:
Export the video at NTSCDV 640 X 480 (has been said to maintain the correct aspect ratio for web, as opposed to television. If for television then I leave it at 720 X 480)
Then, when encoding to an FLV I crop the edges off, and then to keep the entire dimensions the exact same I then lose 5 off top and bottom leaving me with the dimensions 627 X 470.Am I a complete failure to our industry? Naturally, I just want to do it the Right way! : )
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We’re not going with a Flash server either. I did read your first response, and although I was being somewhat facetious about the high quality video that networks compress to Flash, I’m serious about the H.264 to Flash question. I’m surprised your web person couldn’t find any info on it, there’s been plenty from Apple, Adobe, and many others. The simple answer is, create an H.264, change the file from.mov to .f4v and it’s a basic .flv type file that will play as progreesive download when called up by a .swf. It ain’t rocket surgery. 🙂 Adobe’s site has a tutorial (and they suggest changing the H.264 to a .flv instead of .f4v, but other Adobe resources and some tutorials suggest the .f4v for good reason).
https://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/hd_video_flash_player.html[walter biscardi] “I’m not going to spend any money on a Flash Media Server service at this time as QT is working fine for us. My web designer has seen the same postings about h.264 supported by Flash 9 but can’t find anyone who’s actually been able to make this work or any sort of means to make this work. She has gone ahead and created an HTML page for our video samples for time being.”
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[Ed Dooley] “The simple answer is, create an H.264, change the file from.mov to .f4v and it’s a basic .flv type file that will play as progreesive download when called up by a .swf. It ain’t rocket surgery. :-)”
We’ve tried that and the Adobe Flash Player won’t play anything like that.
Adobe Media Player plays the H.264’s natively now with the latest updates and that’s nice. I have my web designer looking over the whole Flash Player article to see what options we might have, but it sounds like in the very near future Flash Player will just be able to open up H.264’s natively and that will make everything even easier.
Walter Biscardi, Jr.
Biscardi Creative Media
HD and SD Production for Broadcast and Independent Productions.STOP STARING AND START GRADING WITH APPLE COLOR Apple Color Training DVD available now!
Read my Blog!
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[walter biscardi] “We’ve been testing Flash for Video using Adobe’s Flash Encoder and not getting good results unless we up the data rate or choose to go with a Flash Media Server, ala disney.com’s website. So we’re staying with QT h.264 files.”
therein lies the issue.
The adobe encoder is not up to the quality of On2.
There really is a world of a difference, you might
check out the demo of on2flixpro.You don’t have to have a streaming server to make high quality flash videos like disney.com Dollars to donuts that on2 could make it the same quality as disney.com
The server to push the content is required because its disney.com and they need it for all the daily visitors they get. Average company sites don’t need that at all.
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Ian,
I use a little app called Video2SWF, it allows up to 1600 mbs movies, which look great, it’s easy to use and the movies are self-contained with players of your choice, I did my whole Web site with it. Completely painless and quick. See my profile if you want a look.
BTW note that I am making SWFs as opposed to FLVs, which IMO are a pain in the ass.
Have a wonderful day.
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