Adobe Media Encoder. Poor FLV Quality

Question

Greets,
I'm using Adobe Media Encoder (AME) to output a CS4 Premiere Pro project at 515x240.
I created a custom "Desktop" Premiere project setup with 515x240 and square pixels. That project previews look fine. The preview in AME looks fine. The output is horrible. No matter what I set my FLV output settings for the images and text are horribly stretched. And yes I am setting the output also for 515x240 square pixels.
Format: FLV
On 2 VP6
515x240
Frame Rate: 30fps
VBR Two passes
Bitrate: 1,500 (AME's default)
Min Bitrate: 80
Max Bitrate: 120
Bitrate Variability: 80
Here is an example... http://www.effectwebmedia.com/video.html
I'm pulling my hair out. Any ideas? Thanks!

Answer 1

A couple things:
1) VP6 and H.264 are codecs that operate in "mod16". What that means is that they begin by dividing a video image into 16x16 blocks, followed by 8x8, 8x4, and 4x4 blocks. This makes for a more efficient encode. Your 240 dimension is fine (240 / 16 = 15), but the 515 dimension could be slightly problematic (515 / 16 = 32.1875). The codec will stretch or compress the image to fit into that dimension, and so can result in a lower quality encode. If you can, try encoding at 512x240, by cropping a couple pixels in the horizontal dimension. May not make a big difference, but it's good practice with these codecs.
2) To me, your original encode looks like the product of Adobe's less-that-capable deinterlacing scheme. You're dealing with progressive assets and a progressive target. I'd submit that the reason your 1280x720 encode looks better is that you're using a progressive preset, with no deinterlacing necessary when exporting. One thing you could check is the field order of your original sequence setup--if it's interlaced, I'd say you have your answer. If it's progressive--well, then I'm wrong :) However, you didn't explicitly say this in your original post, but it's worth a look.
If it is interlaced, I don't think you can change that after the sequence is started, so just create a new sequence with the proper progressive settings, and copy and paste the original sequence contents into that one. Now, when you export, there will be no need for deinterlacing.
Anyway, that's my guess...