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

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Best Video Compression for the web???

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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Their making a FLV file from your sent in video.
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here are one of the settings I used,
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If you go to http://www.jiyano.com and click on the star on
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Name: hd test 160206
Description: H.264 for high-bandwidth streaming
File Extension: mov
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HD video compressed for the web

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