Reel Web Compression

[Josh Silfen]

I was wondering if anyone had any suggestion for compressing a reel for viewing online. I know online is obviously not the best viewing environment for anyone's work, and even with the best compression methods the results can sometime be cringe-inducing, but it often seems like the most practical way to get your work out to a lot of people. I'm just looking for any info on compression methods that people have had luck with. Are certain formats better than others? Quicktime? RealPlayer? I use a Mac, but I think images often appear brighter on a Mac than a PC. Should I have different versions for Mac and PC users? Should I increase the brightness for PC users in the compression software, or before I output the project in Final Cut Pro? Any ideas or info on this topic would be greatly appreciated.

 

Thanks,

Josh Silfen

[Guest Adam Valuckas]

I use Cleaner to make my quicktimes- film 384k streaming. With this setting i can easily stream two videos on a single page. I personally only use quicktime but to be super safe i would have quicktime and windows media. Oh on my quicktime i boost my brightness to 8, seems to help.

 

my site valuckas.com . seems firefox dosnt like two quicktimes up at once, this sucks.

[Phil Rhodes]

Hi,

 

What sort of quicktime, what codec, what settings, what kind of audio? Cleaner i s the auto-exposure of video compression; it makes it so easy you end up not having any idea what you've actually created.

 

I tend to go for Sorenson 3 Quicktimes on the basis that it's the most modern, effective codec that's generally available to everyone. Quicktime is certainly the way to go - the download, should your users need it, is cross-platform, fairly painless and the software doesn't introduce a whole load of sneakily-downloading junk onto your machine - I tend to avoid Windows Media for exactly that reason.

 

Yes, there are better codecs and there are more compatible codecs, but I take the position that it's more or less the sweet spot between the very latest, cleanest codec that nobody's got, and something that's so ancient it looks awful. When I'm releasing CD-ROMs I tend to include an MPEG-1 as well, since anything produced in practically the last ten years can play them out of the box and they look OK, but they tend to be fairly big and it isn't really that viable for the web. I have occasionally used various of the MPEG-4 implementations in an AVI wrapper, which are fantastic, but you have to know that the user's either got or is happy to download the appropriate software.

 

As to compression settings... well... how long's a piece of string? What's the source material, how long is the production, what's the patience level of the target audience? Is the source material already noisy/grainy, how good do you and the audience "need" it to be? Are there server bandwidth issues, upload limits, a known connection base at the player end? Good video compression is an art and a science (to which Cleaner is not the universal answer) and depends enormously on the moment to moment content of the video.

 

Phil