Compressing For The Web

Hi All,
I have a video that's 320 x 240 @ 25fps... It's about 17mb and I want to compress it for web. Can I do this using Compressor? What would be the best settings?

Tom:
You can use any of the Web Download (Q7) presets to get a H.264 encoded video. What format is your source?
Alberto

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HD video compressed for the web

I was doing some testing trying to figure out the best way to compress the HD video I get from the Sony XDCAM HD for the web (streaming). I shoot in HD (1080/30P) because it's needed for our videos. The web streaming is secondary.
I would prefer to make the web videos .flv because it works best and most easily cross-platform. In the real world, the majority of users have Windows PCs, which made me hesitant to use h.264 (.m4v) because it probably would require the average user to download things they may not wan to. Nonetheless, it has to be viewable on all computers in all browers.
So, I took three 10 second clips of steady camera video with audio from the camera that I used in all tests. I will refer to them by clip number...
Clip 1: 30P 16:9 High quality, 10sec=45mb
Clip 2: 30P 16:9 Low Quality, 10sec=24mb
Clip 3: 60i 16:9 High Quality, 10sec=45mb
First I tested making FLV is Adobe CS3 Encoder using the High Quality (700) setting.
Test 1 used size 848x480 (16:9)
Clip 1: 1.3mb
Clip 2: 1.1mb
Clip 3: 1.2mb
Comments: Looked very crisp, audio was clean, slightly darker image than original on default settings
Test 2 used size 480x270 (16:9)
Clip 1: 1.2mb
Clip 2: 1.1mb
Clip 3: 1.1mb
Comments: Looked very crisp, audio was clean, slightly darker image than original on default settings
Next, I tested making .m4v using the h.264 iPod settings in Compressor.
Test 1 used size 640x370.
Clip 1: 240kb
Clip 2: 1440kb
Clip 3: 204kb
Comments: Image wasn't quite as clean as the Flash files, but still good. Much lighter/brighter than the Flash files also. Low Quality HD video had high file size... why? I don't know, but I don't shoot on LQ for things anyway.
Test 2 used size 320x180.
Clip 1: 160kb
Clip 2: 865kb
Clip 3: 865kb
Comments: Image wasn't quite as clean as the Flash files, but still good. Much lighter/brighter than the Flash files also. Low Quality HD video had high file size... also the 60i file...why? I don't know.
In conclusion, I'm lucky that I shoot 30P since it worked well in all areas. The h264 codec provides a much smaller file size than Flash, with a good image. Amazing considering we started with a 45MB clip. What are the standards for aspect ratios for putting 16:9 video on the web? I haven't heard much set in stone like you have for 4:3 video. Nonetheless, the 640x360 or 480x270 seem to be a nice size for most uses.
I have heard that in Flash 9 you can chance the m4v extension to flv and it will work. IF that is true, that would be great because now my concern is that a base Windows PC cannot play these .m4v images without plugins/codecs. I suppose right now its a tradeoff between smaller file size/less compatibility with h264 or larger file size, great compatibility with Flash.
Any comments or suggestions to help out would be great. I typed this fast so forgive me if I left out any important info.

Hi APPLE27:
One comment from your post that immediately caught my attention was this, "Nonetheless, it has to be viewable on all computers in all browsers."
Unfortunately, it is unrealistic to expect one digital video file to be viewable on "all computers in all browsers" as there are simply too may variations in both hardware and software.
A common approach when offering digital video is to provide two formats to choose from and then within each of those two formats a few versions of the video for different bandwidths.
For example, a web site might offer Video for Windows and QuickTime. For each of these, there would be a low bandwidth Video for Windows file and QuickTime file and a high bandwidth Video for Windows file and QuickTime file (four files total). Of course, there's also Flash Video, Real Video, MPEG1, and so on.
For better or worse, YouTube.com has allowed video content creators the realistic expectation of creating a digital video file that is viewable on "most computers". But, the video is unavoidably tied to that web site.
When it comes to online distribution of video, it's still very open ended.
Also, computers are not all that's out there. Mobile devices are a huge market and you'd be hard pressed to create a single digital video file that will play on all mobile devices (iPhone, iPod Touch, Palm Treo, Sony PSP, etc.) either from local storage or from a mobile browser.
QuickTime offers a solution for creating a referencing movie - one file that links to other digital video files, but it too is imperfect at best when it comes to reaching the broadest audience possible.
With my few comments here, I'm just scratching the surface. But, it all starts where you are right now: caring about the image quality when exporting from your edited master.
-Warren

Best Video Compression for the web???

I have read a number of discussions about which codec to use to compress video for the web and I’ve done my own tests and bar the longer encode time, which is not a problem to me, H.264 seems to come out as the best. I can get a superb quality, small enough for a quick download EXCEPT… this website needs to be friendly to the PC community.
What do you all suggest I do?
Go with lower quality MPEG-4 or Sorenson 3 and have my work look “not so good” or use awesome H.264 and provide a link to download the codec, which busy PC people will probably not bother to do.
This is my dilemma.
Thanks in advance for any advice.

I love the results I get when using H.264. Even low data rate files look good (even when I display them double size).
But it requires your page visitors have QuickTime 7 installed to view your QT files.
QuickTime 7 is nearly a year old and most of your Mac viewers will have it installed. It is also "bundled" with the iTunes software download that many PC users have installed.
H.264 is the only codec that requires version 7. Any other choice can be played using older versions of QuickTime.
As much as I like H.264 its installed viewer base doesn't reflect the visitors system settings for Web work. If your crowd is savvy to QuickTime they will not mind the download to upgrade. If you use tracking software on your visitors you'll be able to see if they hang around for the download.
MPEG-4 may be a better Web use choice.

Compressing for the web[help]

hello is any body there that can tell me why when i try to compress with the .h624 i think it is, a 37 minutes short, it takes a very long time, to compress 15minutes it took 5 hours, now when i checked it said that it needed 35!! more hours!!! sould i up grade? i was told this problem is because my final cut is runing in "ROSSETA"
i have runin in it academic final cut pro 5.0.0
i have a macbook pro .2.16ghz intel core duo
1 gb memory
I Monrroy
MacBook Pro Mac OS X (10.4.8) G4 tower

I would suggest asking this in the Final Cut pro forum.

Should I deinterlase my movie before compressing to a h264 file for the web

Hi I have a movie in fcp that I want to compress for the web. I am going to compress it to a h264 file using quicktime. I was wondering if I should deinterlace the movie before compressing it
thanks sam

I have done it both ways and on computer monitors at least its always been my experience that DEINTERLACING the video looks better. Quite a bit better.
Now there are 2 main ways to do it. And I've gotten similar results both ways. You can deinterlace from within Final Cut Pro which works fine or you can set Compressor to Deinterlace. Now I've read articles on why one is better than the next, but at least with Final Cut Pro 5.1.4 in the videos I've worked on I can't tell the difference. It looks good both ways.
Hope that helps-

Compressing video for the web

I have had people ask me to make a short 30 clip for the web say of some of there sporting shots, what is the best way to go about knowing what kind of compression you use and what type of file is best.

Bill bill bill... billy B... Will!!! Willy.... BillyWill...
Search is your friend. This comes up three to two thousand times a week.
Don't expect me to spoon feed you... but export it as a quicktime conversion and use one of the presets.
I really like Broadband High... will be in h.264 and will be roughly 3 megs a minute-- will look a whole lot better than the demo reel you have up on your site right now.
Good luck,
CaptM

Problems with PSE 10 when saving for the web.

I'm having problems saving for web with PSE 10. I edit in RAW, edit in PSE 10, save as Jpeg, resize and save for the web. Results are muddled and not sharp (looks cartoonish). Also, there is no metadata when you look at the image properties. I uninstalled the program and installed again. No change.

Are you resizing the photo before save for web?
What settings are you using in the save for web dialog for the jpeg quality?
If you compress the jpeg too much (low quality settings below 60), that can make your photos look bad.
And save for the web in pse 10 automatically strips any metadata in order to keep the file sizes smaller.
Also, the save for web in pse 10 has a bad habit of not remembering your last used settings, so it's good to verify that your actually set to jpeg instead of the default GIF setting.
Message was edited by: R_Kelly

Best way to save HQ video for the web?

What´s the best settings for great video-quality for the web?
I have a 5 min long clip I´d like to put on my website.
I would like it to be 480x360 and with good quality. It´s ok if the file gets 30-40 MB.
I have tryed the Expert Settings, Quicktime Movie, Broadband - High, but the movie gets "striped".
What´s wrong?
A lot Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Hi Magnus40,
I'm not sure what you are doing to create this problem. I create web movies all the time and have never had this problem, although, I never use the advanced settings cos I have never had to. When you go to the Quicktime export pane in iMovie you have the quality choices from full quality to web. When you select one of these it gives an estimate of the file size. For that length clip you should not need to use any setting besides full quality. I'd say the problem is coming from the 480x360 aspect ratio. This is what is compressing the file. Have you tried exporting it as full quality and then uploading it? The only problem you face by doing this is, it will take a long time for the movie to load on your website. For a short clip you may find that the CD ROM setting is sufficient.
Good luck.
SR

Best way to encode Quicktime file for the web?

Hello all and thanks in advance for your help with this problem.
I need to know the best way to encode a quicktime clip for the web.
This was my first try:
http://www.denmothers.net/trailer-big.htm
It works fine in safari, firefox, and ie for mac, provided they have quicktime 6 or later but it seems not to work on pc browsers. The file is encoded as an .mp4 using compressor and played with the browser's quicktime plugin. I've read that encoding files as a .mov provides greater compatibility but when i compress it as a .mov using the mpeg4 codec the file sizes are huge and when i use the photo-jpeg codec the quality is poor. h.264 looks great and has low file sizes but then my viewers have to have quicktime 7 which i think is too limiting because many will have older computers.
How should I encode my file such that it works best across browsers and platforms and has the highest quality at the lowest size?
Best,
Keegan

If you open an .mp4 file in quicktime pro you can then select File->Save-As and you are presented with two options:
Save as self-contained: This will create a .mov that is the same size as your .mp4 but is playable on any system w/ QuickTime 6 and the Mpeg-4 codec. (PC's included).
Save as reference: This will create a small (>500kb) file that will simply reference the .mp4. If they're in the same folder the .mov created will open the .mp4. Without the .mp4 the .mov in this case is useless.
For what you're trying to do I suggest going with self-contained.

Getting best possible look for the web!

I am using Compressor for compressing my footage for the web. When I export out of FCP my footage looks nice and crystal clear however when I compress the footage then upload to the net its not as nice looking as it was. Now I recently bought a Compressor DVD Tutorial by Ripple Training Series. I pretty much knew just about everything on that DVD. I did try some suggestive settings that have made somewhat of a difference but its not crystal clear like many videos I see uploaded to DVXuser. The settings below might be okay it might just be the hosting site I have my videos on. Currently I am using www.sharkle.com
Here are some settings I use:
Compression Type - Sorenson Video 3
Frame Rate 15
Key Frame Every 75 frames
Quality - Medium
Restrict Data to 400kbps (this is for DSL modems) around 1500 for cable modems
Audio
Q Design Music 2
Channels = Stereo
Sample Rate = 48k
Streaming = Fast Start
Geometry
320x240
If anyone sees anything that I should change or try out differently please let me know. Again I am using Compressor and can also compress using Quicktime as well.
Here is a link to the latest video I completed for the web:
http://www.sharkle.com/video/78755/
I am not sure if SHARKLE is recompressing the footage. If it is then thats why its not as good of quality.

Their making a FLV file from your sent in video.
Push your video back up to a high quality movie and send that in to them.
What you have sent in has all been squeezed highly with compression. Then they take and further compress it in the FLV format. Double compressing...not good.

Recomended configurations for creating video for the web

I'm working on a project creating video segments for the web (no plans for broadcast of DVD) and I'm looking for opinions on the most efficient way to use FCP to do this. We are shooting with an HD camera with a green screen and composting a couple of additional layers of Motion graphics and we found that the render times were really long. I'm looking for ways to mitigate this, on thing we did was switch from shooting in 1080p to 720p. We also tried shooting at 24fps instead of the broadcast 60fps and that cut our render time by a good percentage. Since the final product is going to be 640 by 360 at 15fps it seems like a good trade off but are there any down sides I'm not thinking of.
I was also wondering if there might be an advantage to working at the size of the final product, if the FCP sequence were 640 by 360 would there be any advantages in terms of render times and what might the disadvantages would be.
This is my first semi-professional project, just been a hobbyist up until now so any advice is appreciated.

MoSaT wrote:
We are shooting with an HD camera with a green screen and composting a couple of additional layers of Motion graphics and we found that the render times were really long. I'm looking for ways to mitigate this, on thing we did was switch from shooting in 1080p to 720p. We also tried shooting at 24fps instead of the broadcast 60fps and that cut our render time by a good percentage.
those simple steps reduced the number of pixels in each frame from about a million to 750,00, about 25%; and you reduced the number of frames from 30 or 60 to 24 or 48. So, yeah, your rendering times are going down. If your Motion project has ten HD layers you're saving tons of processing.
MoSaT wrote:
This is my first semi-professional project, just been a hobbyist up until now so any advice is appreciated.
Since the final product is going to be 640 by 360 at 15fps it seems like a good trade off but are there any down sides I'm not thinking of.
Absolutely. But you engaged the project without knowing how you were going to accomplish anything; implies your plans for improving workflow will be similarly incomplete. We all got by with NTSC and plan ol' DV for decades. The web is a low end distribution system, not a theatrical viewing experience. You can force your viewers to download a huge file and watch it on their TVs or you can open it up in weensy teeny window on their iPhones.
MoSaT wrote:
I was also wondering if there might be an advantage to working at the size of the final product, if the FCP sequence were 640 by 360 would there be any advantages in terms of render times and what might the disadvantages would be.
Purists will be correct in telling you better source footage results in better uploads. I will tell you that's true but it's academic. Your realworld needs are based on your web upload, not your plans to archive high def footage for future exploitation.
Here's what I'd do: Work backwards. Figure out what your upload needs are--exactly. Research Compressor and other compression systems to determine how you are going to process your project to get the target output. Now decide what format that software wants to process to create the best results. then figure out how you want to provide that input for the compression application. then figure out what the tradeoffs are for your original footage in terms of your camera resources, your skills with the camera, and your mistaken impression that effects and chromakey should be fast.
bogiesan

Recording for the web P2

I do not believe there is a way but it would be nice if there was an option to record for the web on a P2 card. I am recording tech meetings (HVX200) and uploading them to the web, taking out the extra step of compressing it sounds like magic.......is this possible??

All you have to do is check the settings on the camera for the different formats it shoots... that's with any camera, but I can tell you with pretty good certainty HVX200 doesn't shoot to any compressed web-friendly formats.

HD720p for the web

I tried and tried to compresse from my HD720p out from FCP to 720p for the web. I get awfull results. pixalised images and bigger files. are their presets for the web, or any place where I can find the good settings to get files that look as good as the apple HD galerie. It's suppose to be easy with apple but this time it's not.

here are one of the settings I used,
I did try with more quality but got
not so good results with verry big files
If you go to http://www.jiyano.com and click on the star on
the top left you will see what I mean. I put a before and after picture.
Name: hd test 160206
Description: H.264 for high-bandwidth streaming
File Extension: mov
Estimated file size: unknown
Audio Encoder
AAC, Stereo (L R), 48.000 kHz
Video Encoder
Format: QT
Width: 1280
Height: 720
Pixel aspect ratio: default
Crop: None
Frame rate: 29.97
Frame Controls: Off
Codec Type: H.264
Multi-pass: On, frame reorder: On
Pixel depth: 24
Spatial quality: 73
Min. Spatial quality: 25
Key frame interval: 24
Temporal quality: 50
Min. temporal quality: 25
Hinted for QuickTime
streaming server

Exporting video for the web for windows Media player

What software can i use to compress an AVI file for the web. The finished product will be WMA file.

WMA is Windows Media Audio. I think what you meant is WMV (Windows Media Video). To export to that format on a Mac you'll need Flip4ac, available from www.flip4mac.com Once you've installed it, it adds the WMV and WMA export option to QT and other apps such as Sorenson Squeeze.
-DH

Export for the Web and File Naming : Batch problem in Photoshop CC

Is it possible to use "File Naming" when you are using in a batch "Save for the Web" export ?
What I want to do:
I have images that I need to resize, crop and rename (change "filename.jpg" to "filename_850x490.jpg" and make an optimisation for the web
I want to create an action that I can use in a batch
What is working :
I can use my action (resize, crop, save) and use file renaming option if I use "save as" options
I can use my action (resize, crop, save for the web ...) but the file renaming option are not use at the export,
So I have to create two actions (one for resize, crop and rename and an other to compress images with "save for the web"
==> What's wrong with "File rename" and "save for the web"?
Thank You for support !
My Environement :
Photoshop CC : last update
OS : Windows 8 Entreprise - 64 bits
Proc : Intel Xeon CPU E5 3.00 GHz - Ram : 8 GB - GPU : AMD FirePro V5900 (FireGL V)

Probably a lot easier if you use the Image Processor Pro script
(part of Dr. Brown’s Services 2.3.1)
http://www.russellbrown.com/scripts.html

Compressing For The Web

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