Quick time encoding settings

[James Purdie]

OK…MY BAD…I don’t totally follow. Sorry for my ignorance…..

I basically just have my own website and would like to post some quicktime vids that will hopefully play at fairly decent quality.

I’m looking quick time settings now. For example:

1. What compression type?
2. Frames/sec (i imagine same as source)

I guess the big question is the compression types which i’m not familar with. What type does the COW use? If it isn’t a super secret?

[James Purdie]

I just took a look at one of the cow vids. It’s been a while since I looked at one. But it does appear that they are FLASH 10 format aren’t they?

The Cow Intro looks great!!

[Kevin Camp]

essentially if you want the best image quality and the smallest file size, you won’t render that from ae.

what you’ll render from ae is a high quality render, like uncompressed, lossless, photo-jpeg… etc.

then you’ll take that to a compression utility that can do multi-pass compression to h.264. the container can be mov, wmv, mp4, flv, etc., whatever works best for you. i prefer mp4 because it can be opened in a variety of players — it doesn’t require quicktime, windows media player or flash, but your website software or even host may have a preference…

as for the compression utility, i don’t know if adobe’s media encoder came with cs3, but if it did, you could take a look at that. another freebie i use often is mpeg-streamclip. it’s also multi-platform. just choose to export as mpeg-4, enable multi-pass and b-frames and make other adjustments as necessary.

for suggestions on data rate, frames size, frame rate and such, you might enquire over at compression forum… web streaming is not really my area….

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[James Purdie]

I have succeeded in making a pretty decent mp4 file. I’m not sure how to make it play on the web though? Any hints in that direction? The new playback on the Cow Tutorials is pretty awesome. It shows that Adobe Flash Play 10 is playing the vids, yet I don’t think it is FLV video.

And yet, when I try to add a MP4 vid to my media insertion on dreamweaver, it doesn’t seem to work. Hmmm…

[James Purdie]

Well…I discovered a free Flow Player that will play the H264 format. I noticed that Lynda.com is playing theirs with a JW Player. Still curious bout Creative Cow.