High quality videos available on our site for viewing by public.

	Re: High quality videos available on our site for viewing by public. by Phil Balsdon on Mar 12, 2009 at 10:03:53 pm Hi David, I just went through this process for my own website. The first thing I found was the original quality and shooting style had a great deal to do with final output quality. Material shot originally in progressive scan faired a lot better than original interlaced video. For instance the first two samples on this page; http://www.steadi-onfilms.com.au/Cine%20Showreel/cine_showreel.html (Australian Alps and Museum of Australia) were shot a Panasonic Varicam using 720p60 and look very good (apart from a small amount of blur in the lower quarter frame of the fourth shot in the Alps commercial). The reason movie trailers look so good is a lot to do with the qualities of film (true progressive scan) and the cinematography shooting style. Generally speaking there is a lot less unwarranted camera movement on feature films. The next item, “Wines of Italy,” came from Beta SP material that had already had a number of generational losses. It was also never originally intended for internet use. The fast cutting doesn’t help either and it’s prone to glitches and stutters when playing on the net. The fourth video, “BMW Art Cars” was originally shot on DV PAL (SD interlaced). Compressed from the original material it holds up well, especially with the amount of camera movement. There is some blockiness in the shadows and the out of sync computer video background in some shots was a problem with compression. All the material was edited with Final Cut Pro 6. Compression was done with Final Cut Studio 2’s Compressor 3. I generally found compressing to H264 was better, very slightly smaller files and very slightly better quality when brought into Flash. This was not the case with the Wines of Italy segment, it seemed to hold up better using the Flash Video encoder to create an FLV file. On the steadicam showreel page you can see a whole lot of problems created by rapid camera movement (a feature of some steadicam work) and the result of poor quality original material in the “So You Think You Can Dance” segment that with the networks permission was recorded off air for use on my site. The compression process was a long learning curve. Each video was created with a slightly different compression setting. It took a long time and came close to driving me nuts. I chose to use Flash because it is compatible with almost all computers and browsers. Previously I had used 240 x 180 Quicktimes, now I’m using approximately 600 x 284 Flash, the new Flash files are less than 2 times the size of the earlier Quicktimes. A compromise is needed between output quality and annoying the viewer with huge download sizes. An option is to create different qualities and offer the viewer the option of a quicker download or higher quality. Finally a lot depends on the internet service and computer being used by the viewer. In Australia we are blessed with one the poorest quality services in the world and expensive bandwidth use. My old G4 800mhz Power Mac plays the videos in a very stuttered manner. On the ADSL line my G5 and Mac Book Pro Intel Core they play very smoothly. There is a little more about this in my blog http://www.steadi-onfilms.com.au/vlog/ Good luck, it's a huge learning curve. Cinematographer, Steadicam Operator, Final Cut Pro Post Production. http://www.steadi-onfilms.com.au/ Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index

	Re: High quality videos available on our site for viewing by public. by Daniel Low on Mar 12, 2009 at 10:36:21 pm Phil, Great post. Thanks for sharing your experiences. This should be over on the compression techniques forum. DL __________________________________________________________________ Fonts are like cologne: A bad choice speaks louder than a good one. Respond to this post   •   Return to posts index