Web Video queries

Question

Hi Guys,
It's been a while since I posted, so I just wanted to let you know that we have been making progress and slowly working through the issues we have had. I have to say that we could not have got this far without the invaluable information on this forum. We are extremely grateful here in the sandbox to all who have helped us thus far. :-). Incidentally, many of the problems we faced in the early days seemed to have been caused by a faulty CPU on our computer, which was running at some 70+ degrees!
Also, all of the following helped ensure a stable working environment for those perhaps experiencing the same issues we had: (not in order and all advice obtained from this forum!)
Reinstalled PrE
Updated to the latest version of PrE
Cleared out organiser and started over.
Obtained a new separate huge hard drive for Media only.
Upgraded to 4 GB RAM
Bought an Nvidea 9400 GT card then fell back the driver as per postings about the latest driver causing problems.
Followed postings about optimizing the PC (removing start up programs etc) from Bill and Steve et al.
Always set PrE to have High CPU priority.
Learnt how to create titles correctly using cut and paste within 'Project'.
Still don't understand how PrE renders titles and face the problem of having to re-render some titles everytime the project opens but hey ho..I'm happier than I was 2 months ago!
Use Digital Media convertor to get the right format for all files within a project.
OK. So we now have our small production ready to convert to flash for testing on our website. This process has raised the following questions which I hope can be answered here:-
We intend to use the 'Flowplayer' player as we have used this before and it seems quite easy to configure. In the past we have converted our 'non PrE projects' (Powepoint to flash for example) to .FLV format as this was the only option available to us with the application we were using. I see that PrE has 3 main options for web videos -  MPEG / AVI / FLV.
Should we stick to Flash video 8 700K? At the moment this gives a 15MB flash video for our current 3 minute PrE project.
The default for Flash Video seems to be NTSC. As our projects are all PAL format - will this cause problems or does FLV always use NTSC?
The 'Advanced' section shows some settings we are not familiar with:
Format: FLV or F4V?
Resize Video? Should this be the same settings as our intended Flash Video size within Flowplayer?Bitrate Settings?
Codec - Sorenson Spark or On2 or VP6?
Bitrate Settings - CBR or VBR?
Encoding passes - One or Two?
We've noticed that when converting to Flash, generally speaking the quality is good, apart from certain pieces of video where we have a Videomerge effect for example. This really pixelates and doesn't look too good at all. Is there anyway around this or is to do with the quality of the source footage?
We have a few 'flickers' on some Fade tranistions. Again - source footage? These flickers are actually in PrE so not related to the FLV conversion.
We have imported some LOGOs (png and jpg) images which don't look so good. We have noticed that if we build the logos again within PrE using TITLES, they look much better. This is very time consuming however.
I think that's it for now. Any help would as ever, be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Craig
Very hot Egypt.

Answer 1

Craig,
The ultimate creation tool for logos, is Adobe Illustrator, or another full-featured Vector design program. The use of Vector allows one to resize to one's heart's desire and NOT degrade the image in any way. Now, Video cannot use Vector art natively, so Rasterization MUST take place somewhere in the workflow. I strongly recommend that one does this Rasterization in an image editing program, that can Import the AI files from Illustrator, and do the Rasterization there. I output these to .PSD (because I use Photoshop), and Import those files. I also do any resizing in PS, prior to my Save_As PSD, though one can still do a tiny bit of Scaling, without adversely affecting the quality.
I like the PSD format, as it preserves Transparency, while JPEG does not, and GIF only allows 1-bit Transparency, either ON, or OFF, no Feathering, or partial Transparency. PNG will allow for more control of Transparency, but I already have everything I need in PSD to begin with and my NLE programs love PSD, so I just save a step and the compression.
If I am creating a Raster logo (pixels and not mathematically created Shapes), I will do this slightly oversized, and then Scale down a little for my final output - again to very close to the size used in the Video.
I have not used GIMP, but many sign its praises. I've always had PS, so I am never looking for an alternative.
Good luck,
Hunt