[Joey Williams]

Basically I want to be able to create commercial type/level graphics, most probably for DVD title pages and intros to commercial type short movies.

[Joey Williams]

I think that was part of my initial problem – I was using QT conversion to get it out of FC. The original footage is HD MiniDV, and I am trying to get it to a good quality MP4. The reason I want MP4 is because I’m trying to use these videos as Flash videos on websites. Flash requires an MP4, or a movie encoded in the Flash Media Encoder, which creates an F4V file.

So, to answer your specific questions:

What kind of footage are you working with?
HD MiniDV
What codec is your sequence?
I need to use H.263, in form of MP4
Are you adding effects and titles?
The only effects I’ve added are a filter for each video for some color correction and some cross dissolves.

[Joey Williams]

Thanks Rafael. I really appreciate the info. I’ve been trying to do this in Compressor all night, but haven’t got it right quite yet. I’m getting close though. Is it just as good to render it right out of FCS, or is exporting to Compressor the road to travel? Again, I really appreciate all your info. Saving my butt right now.

[Joey Williams]

Awesome. Thanks Rafael.

I am shooting in 16:9, so I actually ended up bumping it down to 480 x 270 to make the file a smaller size. My programmer tells me I need to shoot for 5M video file size. I am very frustrated though, because it makes my video look like total crap when I crunch it down to that size, and that is using Compressor.

We are deploying this site on my own server, a brand new XServe that is hosted at a big co-location place, so bandwidth is pretty much wide open. I don’t know how to calculate how much bandwidth I have though to figure out how to really size this thing. I feel like my programmer just wants a really small file, but doesn’t really understand how the video will actually load.

I really do appreciate your info. I’m going to keep working with this.

[Joey Williams]

Thanks for responding. The media I’m working with came from an HD-MiniDV Canon camera. Like I said, I have a series of these short videos I want to use for Flash videos in a website, but in the settings I’ve been using it makes a 1min video 19M – not acceptable my programmer tells me. I really want to keep as much video/audio quality as I can without making a huge file.

Is there a size you recommend that is smaller than 575 x 325 – unfortunately, I cannot go larger at the moment.