render for YouTube

[Ron Shook]

John,

[John Magee] “The WMV renders I’ve been trying look OK, but end up too large (100mb limit)The Web-streaming forum suggested using H.264, Mp4 in Vegas.”

I think that the web-streaming forum is not correct. Bunch’a FCP folks, apparently. (g) Several things I’ve seen indicate that WMV plays better with Flash, that it presents a better product for Flash re-encoding at the very low bit rates that you can upload to YouTube. And yes, it is Flash8 that YouTube uses. You’re on the right track, just customize the data rate lower. This guy’s stuff looks quite good and he tells you just what he does with Vegas to get there:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03p3UlvkAT4

Apparently, although they don’t document it, you can upload Flash8 directly to YouTube and it will be used without re-encoding as long as you stick to the YouTube perameters. These are, I believe, 320×240 video, 22khz, 16bit mono audio, at a total bit rate not much above 200 kbps, definitely not more than 250 kbps. I’m not sure about the audio. It may be 8bit at even less that 22khz. However, WMV may still be the preferred method, even if you have PPro to encode directly to Flash8 with the ON2 codec, because the version of the ON2 codec that comes free with Adobe apps that have Flash export has only CBR, single pass encoding.

To get really good Flash8 exports at the very low bit rates that YouTube uses you need to have 2 pass, VBR encoding to Flash8 and that only comes with the $200 Flix ON2 plugin. I’m not sure if this plugs into Vegas, and if not, and you don’t have Adobe or other stuff that it plugs into, you’d need to get the $250 stand alone version for use with Vegas. The $40 version from Flix is the CBR limited version that comes with Adobe products.

Ron Shook

[Terry Esslinger]

Since the stand alone FlixOn2 runs $250 and I can get a full fledged Sorenson Squeeze for 250, which one would be the best?
I am using PC not Mac and am using Vegas.

[Randall Raymond]

[Terry Esslinger] “Since the stand alone FlixOn2 runs $250 and I can get a full fledged Sorenson Squeeze for 250, which one would be the best?
I am using PC not Mac and am using Vegas.”

Sorenson (Flash 7) greats larger files (about 30% larger!) and inferior video compared to Flash 8 (On2). Really, a no brainer.

[Terry Esslinger]

OK, so you are saying that even though I can get Sorenson Squeeze for half price through Digital Juice that it would be better to get On2 – for the same price? Sorenson is old tech and On2 is new tech?

[Terry Esslinger]

deleted duplicate post

[Randall Raymond]

[Terry Esslinger] “OK, so you are saying that even though I can get Sorenson Squeeze for half price through Digital Juice that it would be better to get On2 – for the same price? Sorenson is old tech and On2 is new tech?”

Exactly. I think On2 has comparisons on their site. Flash 8 is simply superior – and one of the reasons MSNBC switched from Windows Media to Flash 8.

[John Magee]

Ron – Thanks for the really informative post.

I tried a demo of the $40 On2 encoder, and yes, it’s not good quality.
I went back to WMV and messed with it some more and am uploading to Youtube now.

I’ll hang on to my money for now,not ready to spring for a good Flash encoder.

Thanks again.

[Ron Shook]

Terry,

[Terry Esslinger] “Since the stand alone FlixOn2 runs $250 and I can get a full fledged Sorenson Squeeze for 250, which one would be the best?”

What Raymond says is flash on, so to speak. (g) Another thing to consider is that Squeeze is a full compression suite, not just the flash7 that it contains, while ON2 Flix is just the one codec, albeit the best for Flash encoding. You can add Flash8 to Squeeze as a plugin for $200. I forget what Sorenson calls the Squeeze version that contains ON2 (Sqeeze Pro?), but you could go to the Sorenson site and find out. If you are going to do a lot of encoding and not just Flash8, it might be better to spend the extra because you will gain not only a great compression suite with all the customizable possibilities that entails, but batching capabilities as well.

Ron Shook

[Randall Raymond]

[John Magee] “I tried a demo of the $40 On2 encoder, and yes, it’s not good quality.
I went back to WMV and messed with it some more and am uploading to Youtube now.

I’ll hang on to my money for now,not ready to spring for a good Flash encoder.”

Out of Vegas, you must encode to QuickTime (mov) before encoding to Flash 8 (VP6) – On2 does its best encoding from QT files. Never encode to Flash video from another ‘web video codec’ – which is exactly what you are asking YouTube to do.

The $40 On2 encoder will produce great results if you follow those rules. If you want pristine results on YouTube upload flv files that’s what you must do. View the results and tweak. My advice: YouTube is very vague about video specs – other than frame size – So start high in your flv file’s bit rate – YouTube’s owner, Google, accepts my rightly sized flv video ads as is – 400 bit rate – they don’t appear to me to be re-encoded – neither sound nor picture – my clients love it – we have the best Google video ads out there and the click-throughs to prove it.

[Scott Bush]

If this is true, that youtube uses flash 8, either that is new, or the cow magazine has some bad info in it. In the march/april 2007 issue, on page 25, Aharon Rabinowitz writes in his article “How to Preserve Detail in Mini-Media Movies”, “What youtube doesn’t tell you is that if you upload flv files under 100MB as well, they don’t recompress them… I should mention that this only works with Flash 7’s Sorenson Spark Codec, not the newer Flash 8 VP6 codec…”

Granted this article is several months old, so they may have changed to flash 8 by now (as they should!) but I found this confusing to say the least.