Web movie clips – What format are they? – How to make?

[David Roth weiss]

They are compressed by compressionists who have experimented and perfected their craft, and on top of that the big companies have dedicated video servers made to pump out high quality video bandwidth. Compressing video for the Web takes lots of trial and error, or you can just use Vimeo, which allows anyone to easily stream their Web videos at any resolution up to 1280×720 HD.

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.

[Murray Sawyer]

Thanks David, There must be commercial software that does the compression for you to keep the quality! Can you advise? Is the final format flash?

[David Roth weiss]

There are lots of apps Murray, but none of them does the job for you, you must learn to master them through trial and error. I use Flash for example on my website, and you’ll see pretty darned good compression there, and at large sizes, that also play smoothly, because I used a technique called progressive download. It took me months of tinkering to master Flix Pro to get the stuff at that level. This is why I recommend Vimeo.

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.

[Murray Sawyer]

You have some very smart looking video on your site. I looked at “Rush to War”. What is that file size and do you use a server to play these clips?

[David Roth weiss]

Thanks Murray.

Rush To War is probably 55mb, and it’s not playing from a dedicated server, but just from my ISP, which is GoDaddy. The secret is the progressive download thing, which is built-in to the .swf file created in Flix Pro. That countdown at the start is the percentage of the video file that loads before playback begins. That is a way to make large files playback smoothly without a dedicated server or an expensive service. As I said, it took months of tinkering to perfect.

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.

[Bret Williams]

Progressive download isn’t a technique, it’s a type. Video files are either progressive or streaming. The latter requiring a special (read expensive) server that is more interactive with your connection. Providing a higher data rate when it senses a faster connection or slowing the data rate when it senses congestion. Streaming has other benefits like being able to jump around. For example, if you had a 2 hour program and you’d like to see the end of it right away, progressive kind of sucks. You’d have to wait for it to chronologically download from the start to the end. With streaming you can often jump ahead without downloading the bits inbetween.

Progressive simply describes a linear download of a file. If you choose the it, the encoding can be told to start playing as soon as enough of the file has been cached. There’s no real magic in this, except determining the data rate and quality that makes you happy. I tend to keep things around 500-750mb / sec so that the file will start nearly instantly on a cable or dsl connection. Progressive is great that it actually downloads and caches the entire file just like a jpeg, gif, png, etc. It can easily be saved to the computer and played back later even without the internet.

There are a lot of programs out there. Episode being one of the new ones that some prefer. But it can cost more than FCP itself. In the past I’ve used programs costing a few hundred like Sorensen Squeeze for Flash or Media Cleaner. Flash is generally the file type you’re seeing on the web sites due to the fact that it comes pre installed in nearly every web browser out there. QT doesn’t come installed on Windows machines, and Windows media doesn’t come preinstalled on macs. Both of those are more complex to “skin” as well.

[Brent Hilgenkamp]

I would imagine you keep the data rate around 500-750 Kb/sec, not mb/sec