Re: Compressing video for playback on web

[Brad Keppler] "I've tried the H.264 thing after reading it was the way to go. I ended up getting the file size I wanted (it was under 50 megs), but the video came up looking pretty horrible. I use a lot of text to supplement the tutorial, and it was nearly unreadable."

Brad,

I too have been less than impressed with Compressor's encoding to h.264. I have switched to using Elgatos Turbo.264 encoder. It is a truly amazing little piece of USB hardware. You plug it in, install a little comtroller, drop in your QT file from FCP, select a preset and let it go. It is much faster than Compressor and has better quality.

You would probably use one of the two iPod presets.

I know, you hate it when someone tells you to go buy something to solve you r issues. I do too, but this little gadget costs about $80 and it is worth much more than that in saved time and headaches. Most of my stuff is DVCProHD and it renders it at about 24-25 frames per second, DV comes in at about 40 fps. Another great thing is that it doesn't really matter what you plug it into. I get about the same speed on my 2 year old MBP as I do with a 9 month old MacPro.

K