Video compression for web. H264 codec.

Hello to everyone!
I would be gratefull If someone can help me with some advice on the following matter:
Who can I compress a video which is shot with dslr camera, at 640x424p, 25fps, so that 20 seconds of video do not exceed 1mb.
The final video has to be 512pixels in height and 340 in width, good quality under 1mb.
I usually export this kind of web files using h264. For this job I modified the biterates so that the video does not exceed 1mb but all resulted in poor quality.
The satisfactory quality of the video is reached only after 4mbs(biterate/vbr pass2), in this case the filesize is over 5mb so again no good.
Please help?

And another thing I noticed in Premiere: I usually do a small edit of about 20 seconds from 3-4 clips. Well, this time I compressed the three clips before editing them in premiere. I used the h.264 encoder I talked about and it reduced my filesize to half for each of them(no visible quality loss). Now I imported the 3 files(reduced) in Premiere and the 20 seconds of editing still export as the same big size it was before encoding and reducing the clips. More interresting is that all three clips together have about a minute of footage and they get pretty close to the filesize that the 20 second export video has.
I did another experiment and imported one video file in Premiere and without modifing the content, i wanted to export it to see what happens with the filesize after entering and exporting with premiere. The export was bigger in filesize and lower in quality. One thing changed though: I imported a mov and exported an mp4. So how come my dslr camera exports such good quality videos with such small file size. Is mov better than mp4? If the software camera did such great job compressing the videos, why can't I find a computer software that does the same?
I appreciate your time!
Thank you!

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I'd have to agree with Dave on this one. Your movie dimensions are the biggest hang up.
How about an old Web trick that works nice with H.264 files? Half size.
Using export via QuickTime at the settings that made the 11MB file but set the dimensions scaled half of your intended size.
I know. You want a big display in the Web page. Here's how to do it.
In the html code are special tags used by the QuickTime browser plug-in. One (rarely used) is scale="tofit".
In the embed tag add scale="tofit" and in the object tag use param name="scale" value="tofit"
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Bingo! Big display of a smaller file sized movie. Your viewers will not know what hit them.

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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.
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Can anyone help me with compressions for web streaming? So lost!

Hi there
I am so confused !
I have the task of getting HD footage from my camcorder ready for quality web-streaming on a website. The clips need to be in mp4 format using the H264 codec. As we are dealing with HD footage, I want the viewer to be very happy with the picture quality. I must admit that most of my compression settings were kind of guess work and I was only judging my results by the final file size in relation to the video quality. I was getting file sizes of about 16mb per minute of video/ audio footage.
I had been keeping my frame size at 1280x720 and my bit rates were about 2000-2500kbits/s. Bandwidth is a real concern as there will be alot of people streaming these videos and there might be over a hundred videos on offer at any one time. I found that bit rates any less than this were resulting in a poor picture quality.
I have since learnt that what I was doing is completely wrong!
I was told that my frame size was way too big for normal web-streaming of HD footage and also that my bit rate was too high and bandwidth hungry. I never knew that the bit rates I set when compressing my videos would have an effect on the bandwidth that would be used. I am obviously showing my ignorance!
If anyone has anytime to help out someone who has no idea, I would absolutely love to know the answers to these questions:
1. What is considered a good acceptable frame size to show HD quality footage? Maybe a size that if the quality is OK, they can also stretch the frame afterwards to fill their screen without losing too much quality?
2. I want to use mp4 with the H264 codec for streaming, what is an efficient bit rate to set the compression at, so that the quality looks nice, but wont drain my bandwidth unnecessarily?
3. Can anyone explain how the bit rates that I set for my compressions affect the way they are downloaded once they are on a website. Just cant get my head around this logic for some reason?
4. What other compression settings should I be aware of (eg. keyframes etc)
I feel so lost in all of this and would appreciate it tremendously if anyone can help me out.
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If I select a bit rate of say 2500 to compress my videos at, what will that now mean for the end user? Will that mean that his connection will be forced to download that video at 2500kbp/s thus using alot more bandwidth?
Yes and no. If the end user has a connection that allows them to receive data at 2500 and the source from the web can supply data at that speed then they'll be able to stream in real time. However, if either end doesn't hold up (the client's connection can't receive data that fast or the source can't send it) then end users will be forced to watch it on delay - letting a good portion of the movie download first. QuickTime will do this anyway - if you (as I do) embed a movie into a webpage, when you visit that page QuickTime will calculate how fast data is being sent and received, and decide when to start the movie based on that calculation.
I was told that the bit rate I set when I compress these files locally on my machine, tell the streaming software how to allow users to download them - is that true or have I got all mixed up?
You keep saying streaming and I'm not sure exactly what you mean. Streaming can either mean having a finished file on the web that people can watch with minimal downloading in advance, or streaming can mean sending a live event out over the web. I think you mean the first. In that case, there is no streaming software on the server side - it's just a file that gets sent to a client just like any other file. The bitrate however does tell the client software, like QuickTime player when to start playing the movie (As I alluded to above).
If you really want to "stream" content - in other words allow people to go to page and start watching then I'm going to suggest you distribute in multiple formats. QuickTime has a number of presets you can use for "streaming", and these are usually small (320*240 or 640*480) videos that are under 1 Mbps (often less than 500 kbps). These files can normally be watched in real time by most clients.
The other catch with the route you're going is that some computers simply can't handle 720p content that is encoded in h.264 - they just don't have the power. If you look at podcasters many of them have chosen to go multiple formats in part for this reason - they have video embedded on their websites for watching in real time, small iPod formats for lower-power computers and iPods, and HD formats for platforms like the Apple TV that offer the best quality.

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I've been making several clips using H264 compression but due to "unpopular" format only few people can see it (basically only up to date Mac users). Since I want to share my clips with friends over the net I was wondering what is the best large diffusion format with a decent quality or what settings need to be used. With H264 is possible to make a 2 min. clip with exceptional quality with only 5GB.....any idea which other format can do the same?
Thx
tatoz

Hello Tatoz:
Have you read this?
b Getting Your Video Ready for the Web
http://www.danslagle.com/mac/iMovie/qt_plugins/3001.shtml
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What spatial quality setting (Encoder - video settings - quality) are you using for you h264?
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Hi All
While waiting for comments to my question I contacted the producer to the video that I referred to above. When in doubt go to the source.
His reply is…
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QT conversion
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try the h.264 codec. I've done some stuff at 350k -- 640x480 -- it looks great. Since my project was heavy on slides, I just went for 15fps -- but I did run a test at 29.97 and it did not (surprisingly) have much effect on file size.

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I would stick with David's suggestion. You're going to have to compromise size and quality. Any time you're dealing with web media you need to be sensitive to file size and download times. In order to accommodate an acceptable file size that caters to your market you'll have to compress the video which in turn will degrade quality. If your not happy with 800 kbps h.264 try again with a slightly higher or lower bit rate.

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How large are they and in what format (what codec)? Video and a lot of photo files are compressed already and Stuffit or Zip won't make them smaller, in some cases they get bigger.
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Video compression for web. H264 codec.

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