Best format to export videos for streaming internet use

Hi,

I am going to be providing a lot of videos on my website and I'm trying to maintain some quality while decreasing loading time and data usage.

Most of my videos are about 10 minutes long and HD... just exporting them can take multiple hours using my current settings. Some of them I will host on youtube, so I just upload and let them sort it out... the paid content I need to stream from my site itself, and I expect a lot of usage. I've also considered uploading to youtube and then downloading the file that their conversion process creates... however, this still doesn't solve the insane time it takes me to export the vid itself.

Right now I'm using for video:

h.264
high quality
key frame rate 24
600x318 for dimensions

for audio:
ima 4:1

Thats all I know...

Thanks for your time guys!

Those settings are kind of overkill for the web. Also, 800x318 is quite an annusual (although not unheard of) aspect ratio. Is your material standard 16x9 widescreen?

Try the following format:
h264 mid/high (move the quality slider to a little but above the half-way point.)
Key Frames: Automatic
Dimensions: 1280 x 720

Audio:
AAC
48kHz
128kbps stereo or 64Kbps mono (I usually only bother with stereo if there are audio pans that have a real affect on the viewing experience and for music videos where obviously audio quality is important).


If you're finding the encoding takes too long, switch the video settings to single pass. Quite often this is perfectly acceptable anyway.


Make sure your video is rendered inside FCP first. This will speed up the encode as well.

You might also want to look into setting up a Qmaster cluster for rendering with Compressor, but that's another topic entirely.

Alex Elkins
Twitter: @postbluetv
http://www.postblue.tv
Post Blue showreel
Latest work: Greyhounds in Motion at 500fps
My Vimeo Pro page