Streaming Video Online

[David Roth weiss]

Sage,

You have only two ways to compress video to make file size small enough for the Web, you can make the video smaller in terms of it’s pixel dimensions and/or smaller in terms of it’s compression ratio. You have chose to go with a very large pixel dimension, which ultimately means that your compression ratio must be lowered. That means the image will suffer dues to compression artifacts, and those will show even more because of the scale at which the video plays back.

The only way to solve the problem would be to increase the bitrate of the compression, but then you would most likely find that playback will cease to be smooth unless you stream from a dedicated server designed for video streaming, or possibly if you can create Flash files with progressive download, which download a small percentage of the video to each viewer before the video begins to play. Flix Pro from On2 has the progressive download feature, which you can buy, or you could hire me or someone else to to create that for you.

BTW, you have misspelled “Remember” in the video…

David

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor
David Weiss Productions, Inc.
Los Angeles

POST-PRODUCTION WITHOUT THE USUAL INSANITY ™

A forum host of Creative COW’s Apple Final Cut Pro, Business & Marketing, and Indie Film & Documentary forums.

[Ed Dooley]

And post your problem on the Compression Techniques forum. It’s the more appropriate place to find help for compression problems.
Ed

[Sage Dubois]

Thanks for the catch David! I had fixed that sp error once already, but must not have saved it….

So what is the best way to export HD video from Final Cut to be suitable for the web so that it doesn’t give me this problem? What settings do I need to choose?

Thanks again!

[Phil Balsdon]

Beautiful images, I bet the video looks great before the compression for the internet.

Part of the problem you have though is that there is too much camera movement for a compressor to do an ideal job for the internet. What happens in compression is it looks at your video and it changes only the pixels it needs change from one frame to the next. If you have a static panorama with a large area of blue sky it only needs to change a few pixels of slow moving clouds or the pixels of a few tree branches blowing in the wind between one frame and the next frame. Pan across the scene though and it has a lot more pixels to adjust, although some of pixels in the blue sky will remain the same and only change every few frames (depending on the speed of the pan). Or a static frame with a car driving through it when only needs to change the pixels relevant to the car moving.

The worst scenario though is a slow dissolve, every single pixel in every single frame needs to be changed and until the dissolve is complete and the compressor has to make compromises to achieve this. (A bit like if you were a chef in a restaurant and all the other staff called in sick but everything was okay….. until the lunchtime rush arrived).

If you are shooting primarily for the internet you need to adopt a style of cinematography that uses less camera movement, static frames that allow the subject to move within the frame. I always tell my students it’s called a movie camera because it shoots moving pictures, not because you can move the camera. The irony is I’m specialist steadicam operator and always moving the camera!

My experiments with getting video onto my website also found that sometimes Flash Video Encoder produced better results than exporting H264 from FCP and Compressor. Generally however I found H264 to be a slightly better result, it’s a bit of a black art though.

Unfortunately until broadband speeds become much faster this is the way of video online.

Cinematographer, Steadicam Operator, Final Cut Pro Post Production.
https://www.steadi-onfilms.com.au/

[Sage Dubois]

Phil,

Thanks for your wonderful insight on this…..that makes a lot of sense now! I will keep experimenting to try and get the best quality. I appreciate your help 🙂

Sage