Classes or Books on Video For Web

Hello my fellow FMS community!
Does anyone know of some good classes to attend or books to read on delivering video to the web? Also, some classes strictly geared toward the FMS would be awesome too. I've been using FMS since v1 (I believe it was called Communication Server back then) was released and Flash/Actionscript also for a few years now, but it seems there is still so much to learn about this process. The more I read and learn the more I realize I need to be a video producer, programmer, network engineer, and server engineer all wrapped up into one. Even though I've been doing this for a few year I still see other companies out there delivering better vids that don't hiccup at all. It seems like there are some secrets to the whole process that aren't being shared or something I'm missing. At the company I work for we have people who shoot the video primarily for television. After they do their magic a high res QuickTime video is handed to me where I encode it again at different bitrates/setting that I put on the FMS and develop the web interface for the video.
It would just be nice to talk to an expert in the whole process. When I search the web there seems to be a fine line where the knowledge ends but I think the knowledge beyond that point is what makes other people’s video campaigns go from normal to excellent. Also, there's not a whole lot of stuff out there for the FMS. Maybe because it's a little expensive. I want to be able to take my vid campaigns go from normal to excellent too! The one class I’ve been to strictly for web video was in Atlanta, GA where we used this book, Video with Adobe Flash CS4 Professional by Robert Reinhardt. It was really good and I learned a lot even after doing this stuff for at least 3 years, but it provided very little info on FMS. In the end I just realized how much more I didn’t know.
Any direction on higher education would be great.
Thanks!
Eric

Wow, thanks Graeme! These are some great recourses. I've actually used FMSGuru.com for a few things and I'm very appreciative of your work. Thanks again!
Eric

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Exporting HD video for web

What settings should I use to compress a HD video for web?

It depends a lot on what level of broadband you expect the user to have, and whether the video has to play immediately. There are some natural sizes to use for the video, such as 1280x720, 960x540 or 640x360, and the frame rate ought to be 24, 25, or 30, depending on the source material.
Making it for medium to good broadband, and with wanting the video to play right away, you could do say 1280x720, 1 megabit per second, H264. It would look reasonably good. If you don't mind people having to download for a little while before the video can play, then take the data rate up to 3 mbps.
So, one way to look at that would be to use the AppleTV preset from QuickTime Player, then open that mp4 file and save as to mov (just to make your html task easier). It would look very good, but might take a bit of downloading time before it's ready to start playing.

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Using FCP pro 5.1.4 compressor 2.3 and selecting QT 7 for download. Using this on a web site produces less than desirable results. Usually blurry video or I get the "Q" in the movie template of iWeb and have to wait some time for it to download to start playing.
What are the tools used to create the high quality videos in these live events?

I'm tagging this one also.. I'm a new convert to the Mac (one more sleep until Mac Pro deliery!!). I normally do 10 megs for 2 minutes of 640X480 WMV video for web delivery and thought that was good when editing on the PC.. until I started to see some of these tech tutorials also.. and yeah.. crisp! But more importantly, is that thought the 100% viewing size might be on the smaller size, there isn't a lot of visual quality loss when expanding the view to 200% or more.. Now THAT was impressive..
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hi, for your situation, you would expect a video converter software, to convert avi or mpeg to flash video (.flv) for web. You probably know that there are plenty of free video converter out online. like Sothink Free Video Converter which I used for while, and I am sure it supports FLV video conversion. you could have a try.

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I just Googled the specs and it appears this camera shoots SD Mpeg2 at a low data rate.
I'm surprised it's working at all.
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I'm currently putting together some videos in FCP for our new website. I've used FCP a lot for creating video for DVD's and exporting to .mov but converting to flash is relatively new to me.
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Creating videos for web with QuickTime Pro

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Every video format will require a browser plug-in be used.

Settings for the best QT video for web use

I hope you didn't look here thinking I had them.
I don't but I want to know them.
I see great looking quicktime videos that perform automatically and perfectly all the time but I can't seem to make them.
Two of the best are Lynda.com and DigitalJuice.com.
Their videos play instantly, you can push the cursor to the end and the data is there. They just work great, but they are both unwilling to share what they do other than saying it's a combination of Sorenson and Quicktime.
Why is this such a closely guarded secret? I understand that it often takes weeks to uncover this combination on your own, but I've never seen this unwillingness to share in this community any stronger than in these two web sites.
Thay talk all around it but they just won't tell.
I'm hoping someone here might look at their sites and their movies and figure it out and then share it with the rest of us.
Thanks for any help you can provide.
Steve

[email protected] wrote:
> I work for a software company and we make intructional videos and product videos all the time and we are starting to use .flv's a lot more these days. I usually export them in AE and have them set to about 800kbps, preserve RGB and 15fps. But the file sizes are a little bigger then what I thought they would be, the videos are generally around 5 minutes, were green screened so there is some compositing work going on in the timeline and the file sizes are generally around 40mbs....I feel like I can get those down so any help you guys can give me would be amazing!
> Thanks
> - Jim
The 512K setting with a 2Pass encode (using On2's Flix Pro) gives me
files sizes about half of what your getting. I don't tweak anything more
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(I am assuming that the size matters because you intend for web delivery
of the final product.)

Compressing video for web

My friend from Australia is trying to convert a trailer for web streaming but is having troubles with the format. We filmed the videos in Nashville and then he edited the trailer in Australia but every time he sends me a copy it's pixelated... Any suggestions on what settings he should be using on the compressor?
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Sheyla

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Key Frames: Automatic
Frame Reordering: OFF!
Optimized for Streaming (makes a difference!)
Encoding: Best Quality (always use multi-pass)
(if you use these options, then you can set the Data Rate to 9400 kbits/sec -- it will almost always come under the 8Mbps limit)
Sound: MPEG-4 AAC Low Delay 48KHz bitrate 128 - 320 kbps
Check: Prepare for Internet Streaming and select Fast Start
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For those who have gone to Apple's Quicktime page and have viewed the movie trailers...you will know what I am referring to...read on.
For a while now I have been compressing different video segment, of varying length for use on the web. I have compressed the video in all different ways using the H.264 compression for web streaming. However, no matter how good the video footage is SD or HD there still is some degradation in the footage when put to the web...no matter if it is compressed for 100k, 300k or 800k. And even with a high speed line the streaming seems to take a while.
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Thank you.

Hello and welcome to the forum.
No matter what, when you downconvert, you lose quality.
The apple trailers are compressed as follows...
480x360
H.264, AAC, Timecode

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I'm trying to export a 16:9 video clip for web using H.264 compression at 426x240 resolution from compressor using square pixel aspect ratio. No matter what bit rate I set it at -- 600kbps-6,000kbps I still get these really jagged edges. Even though my source is DV, the original file does not have anything close to this; also I have never had this issue before. One other thing to note is that if I export at full resolution H.264 -- 640x360, I don't get any stair-stepping.
Here is a frame grab of the video with the problem:
http://salsunproductions.com/misc/crapy_artifacts-h264-frame.jpg
You can download a video clip of it here (data rate is around 600-700kbps):
http://salsunproductions.com/misc/crapy_artifacts-h264.mov
I'm also noticing some sort of horizontal lines in the artifacts?? This is progressive scan footage shot on a DVX100B 24pA (and captured properly w/2:3:3:2 pull down removal, the original file doesn't have this)
Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. This is getting really annoying having to export huge files...
PS: I'm using Compressor v3.0.2

It could be some scaling artifact. Make your stream progressive using frame controls (stay away from the best setting) and that should help.

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Hi guys,
In my project I am using quick time videos within director,
which work fine when it is published and play back in the
projector. However when I export for web, the videos don't play
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Many thanks,
Rich

Yeah, I did upload them in their relative folder. They are
about 15MB each and 30 seconds long. I don't have a "dswmedia"
foler, what do I need to do with that? The error message I get
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does not exist or failed to initialize properly. Please make sure
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Thanks!

Streaming video for web

I recently created my first website and created a transitioned jpeg slideshow in IMovie to show on the home page immediately when the page loads. Originally, I exported it using custom settings (sized to fit my page and prepared for standard web server) and it worked fine but then I noticed my server now offers streaming so I decided to pursue that thinking that it could somehow make it faster to load for people with slower connections.
I exported again from IMovie (custom size,mpeg-4, 12 frames per second, prepared for internet QT streaming), then uploaded it to the streaming folder indicated by my server, rewrote the code for the page and tried it out but something's wrong. It shows the QT box loading and then is replaced by the initial pic in the movie but then either nothing else happens or it plays really really slow or really choppy. In trying to figure out what went wrong, I found info on my server that the movie is supposed to be hinted using Quicktime so I tried saving the movie compressed but not prepared for web, then opened in QT Pro and exported it as hinted but it doesn't seem to have helped at all. I assume that saving it in IMovie as "streaming" would be the same as saving as "hinted" but thought I'd give that a shot just to make sure.
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I've been spending COUNTless hours trying to figure this one out so any help from someone more in the know would save my remaining sanity.
M
Powerbook G4 Mac OS X (10.4.8)

True "Streaming" requires more than just adding "hint tracks" (required for streaming downloads).
You (your server) must also use Streaming server software like:
http://www.apple.com/quicktime/streamingserver/
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Don't add any level of "features" that your files don't require.
If "regular" (HTTP) works for you why add the headaches of "streaming" media delivery?
Adding "hint tracks" to regular QuickTime files (served via HTTP servers) only makes the file size larger (sometimes up to 20%) and doesn't "do" anything if served without streaming server software.

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For now, it would be on my own website or a clients website. But there may
be another possibility, I have a client that already has some videos
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Classes or Books on Video For Web

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