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.