Flash 8 Encode from FCP: Best Practices?

[Ed Dooley]

A couple of questions:
-How did you arrive at that size? It’s kind of an odd one. Most video encoding works best if the dimensions are divisible by 16.
-Why did you choose that data rate? If you know your audience and you think that restriction is necessary, so be it. But if you think your audience are on broadband, then you should safely be able to increase data rate to 700kbps, a big improvement in quality.
-ON2VP6 is pretty good, but do you need it? Now that the latest version of Flash supports H.264 you could use that. The only issue is that viewers need the latest Flash player to see it. It’s the “audience” part again. If you have an audience that keeps up with the latest player updates, you’re fine, if not, they’ll get an update message. If that’s OK with you, you could go H.264 in Flash. If you have corporate viewers who may be restricted by their IT people from updating, they may be behind the times a bit. In which case ON2 would make more sense.
-Do you need that many key frames? That will give you a marker every 2 seconds. Do you need viewers to navigate that precisely? If not, you could increase that number so it hits maybe every 5 seconds or so.
Ed

[Parker Gowan]

First off thanks for your response, Questions in my rushing around that I should be able to ask myself but never find the time to do so!

So i am talking with our design group on the specifics of the frame size and data rate, but as far as moving away from On2, I think that our restrictions are that we stay within Flash 8, we do have a corporate audience, and the feeling is that 9 is too advanced. in order to stay in 8, does that make On2 the best quality we can do, barring our audience restrictions and all?

As far as key frame, no it does not need to be that precise, I will reduce, thanks!

[John Fishback]

Here’s an excellent article on encoding practice. It’s definitely worth reading.

https://digitalcontentproducer.com/videoencodvd/revfeat/encoding_best_practices_0609/

John

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[Sean Oneil]

[Ed Dooley] “How did you arrive at that size? It’s kind of an odd one”

That’s the standard “Large” size Sorenson Squeeze uses in the Flash 8 presets.

[Sean Oneil]

Parker,

I just started using Flash 8 instead of QT for sending videos to clients. I bought Squeeze and am pretty happy with it. I’m also happy with VP6. I find the quality to size ratio to be really good actually. I use the 1mbps preset, which is good enough for everyone except for those who have the cheapest consumer DSL plan.

If you find a solution for SWF player skins, please let me know about it. The ones that come with Squeeze are a joke. I mean they’re so bad it’s laugh-out-loud funny. I’m resorting to 3rd party apps to make the SWF files – which is a serious pain.

Sean