Hey folks...I come to you again to ask for advice on compression. I have hired two different companies that were to provide top work, but no such luck. I see some great technical work on other sites and haven't had any luck hiring someone to achieve what we are go for. Any suggestions?
Originally Posted by Alex_Manifest_M
What specifically are you trying to get accomplished?
We shoot everything in HD and want it to look this good after compression and have it start and play as fast as this http://www.gaysolos.com/new.html
funny thing is that isn't even that good.
whether it starts right away is partly format - were the videos WMVs? or it can relate to the player on the page, not the movie.
as far as quality, what bitrate were they using? making videos of this quality shouldn't be much of an issue really - every program i've used can do it. did you tell them to make the videos small or give them a bitrate or size they were required to use?
How you host the videos is also important. We use windows media server to host our videos. Each video is in multiple bandwidths and we detect the bandwith of the user automatically and serve them the best stream for their connection.
Windows media server has a special fast start feature just for this.
for Flash you can also use flash media server for the same purpose.
The sample I posted is pretty clear and shows almost no pixelation in the movement which is something I see on almost all videos in this size which load/play this fast. The clarity of the image is pretty good. The very best ones I have ever seen are actually on a site whose content is so 'extreme' that couldn't watch it all the way thru but man it was a tremendous image.
The ones I had done were both in wmv and qt. Bit rates in three sizes 1800, 1000 and 512. Based on the connection speeds of our member base, these seem to be the most effective for videos in 10-13 min lengths.
My own compression is better than what I received. Problem is I want the entire library recompressed and I do not have time. Additionally, I had a bunch of recomendations for Sorenson and it has a bug which will not allow the watermarking feature to work on the Mac version. They have no plans to repair this bug. I don't want to use Final Cut to watermark the final precompressed file because that seems to pixelate in the medium and smaller bit rate files.
The highest possible quality is our goal. These videos are pretty costly to produce and no sense in cutting back on this end.
Still looking for an answer to this one. Getting pretty close to transfering the entire video library to flash and putting on a flash streaming server. We operate on the plan that memberships are rentals of videos not purchase of videos so that seems to be our best bet. The Flash compressions I have seen are far better than anything anyone has been able to present (with the exception of the movie trailers produced in Quicktime). Thoughts?
Are you using mpeg4 video compression, wmv, or just what right now?
Keep in mind that any compression technology is going to vary based upon the content.
The sample video you showed had mostly blank solid color walls and solid color furniture, so there is very little video data to be stored and compressed... therefore, the quality of the video at, say, 1500Kbps will be excellent... but if you had a scene shot outdoors in a forest with lots of leaves rustling in the wind, that would require a LOT more video data and you'd get a lot more pixelation and artifacting at the same 1500Kbps bitrate.
The speed with which a video loads and plays is almost 100% a function of the bandwidth available to the server, and the bitrate at which the video is encoded. If you have 100 customers simultaneously downloading a 1.5Mbit stream, you will need a 1.5 Gbit connection (enormously expensive and requiring (2) gigabit ports on the server) from your server to be able to supply all of them with a constant stream. If you have less than that capacity, the server will handle the requests in round-robin fashion and slow down the feed rate (and therefore the buffering and start time)
H.264 (the newest Quicktime codec) is by most accounts the best "bang for the bandwidth" codec at the moment. I think that WM9 and Flash codecs are about equal, and slightly inferior to H.264 (though that will catch up soon, I'm sure.)
Also, if encoding to Flash, there are several different codecs. I hear that the On2 encoder is supposed to be better and faster than Sorenson Spark, but I haven't directly compared the two.
To deliver hi-def with hi-def detail, you would probably have to encode at a *very* high bitrate... MPEG compressed 720p (the native HDV format) which they are shooting, is about 200 MB/min. What you saw on that site was heavily compressed hi-def. It looks good in full screen, but definitely isn't true hi-def.
Last thing... If you're using HDV (meaning, if you're shooting hi-def to DV tape using the Sony, Canon, or JVC tape-based formats), you're working with a format that is already very highly compressed, the equivalent of DVD MPEG, because you can't fit the uncompressed data onto DV tape. So transcoding it to *any* format, Windows Media, Quicktime, or Flash, is going to introduce at least some artifacting because your source recording is already compressed. The only HD formats (well, in cameras under about $75,000) that are uncompressed are the DVC50 or DVC100/DVC Pro HD formats that store directly to P2 cards or hard drives; DV tape is not capable of recording uncompressed hi-def. That's probably why you're getting the artifacting in the watermark when you insert it with Final Cut.
Hope that helps.
Thanks VERY Much. That is exactly the thoughtful and detailed answer that will help in a concrete way! I really appreciate the time it took to respond in that way. Thanks again!
Alex
We are using WMV and QT at this point.
Gaybucks did a great job at the answer...
Whatever method, file, or codec you choose something else will come out the day you get them all done that will temp you to do them all over again.
We use Digital-Rapid's encoder cards with Streams Pro software for higher end encoding. Because it has video and audio chips that can take the pressure off your computer it can do a bit more with a bit less.
The fun part is that have released some good codecs for Flash. Since you are not broadcasting flash files "LIVE" you don't really need a dedicated flash server even they are are great to have.
In the long run I still feel that .wmv will become better as they finish up on some codecs they are working on. What we have seen looks really good.
Besides the bitrate always remember that a lot of people still live in dial-up or slow DSL areas. If you to streaming in either .wmv or flash you may limit your users.
Keep working on it. Your videos will look great in HD.
gaybucks....i have to thank you as well.
I learned a lot from that answer. I shoot in HD sometimes but I find not many actually want to buy HD content because of the file sizes and yes, so far, when I compress the video to some reasonable size, its hardly worth shooting in HD anyways. In this country, HD tapes are nearly $40 for 60 minutes. But I have to say, the video usually still looks so much better than when I shoot in just DV.
Thanks again mate. :humble:
cheers
Are you using .gtl to load the qt files? I've found that using the .qtl extensions to load a qt kiosk takes a lot of memory on the system downloading the videos.
Wow, looks like the Digital Rapids cards support WM9 and Flash... last time I was looking at hardware encoders, all I could seem to find was MPEG encoding.
Right now, we have three machines that run Sorenson at least part-time (we batch encode at night, usually), but I would be interested in a hardware-assisted solution.
I'm curious if you've done any direct comparisons between, for example, Sorenson Squeeze 4.5, (which is supposed to be much faster than the earlier Sorenson versions) and the Digital Rapids hardware solutions, both in terms of encoding speed and in terms of the overall quality difference between Squeeze and Stream Pro. Also, do you have the 500 or the upper end boards? $900 for the low-end board is pretty much a no-brainer, but $2500 for the higher end board would require a little more cost justification
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