AVCHD to Google Video

Jeff B wrote on 4/22/2008, 7:05 AM
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-7950158717259893288

This clip was shot in early evening, so there was still some sunlight providing enough ambient in the room to shoot without "night shot" on the HDR-CX7. The source file is 1440x1080i, 29.97 AVCHD off the memory card.

I edited with project settings at HDV 1080 1440x1080, 29.97i, and then compressed to WMV with a 640x360 framesize, square pixels, 30p, 500kbps. That file (18MB) was uploaded to Google Video where it was compressed further to Flash.

There's video noise, of course, and that's always problematic when compressing once to an upload file (wmv9), then again "on the fly" as it's uploaded to Flash. But I think I'm seeing some interlace artifacts, too, and wondering what I might've done to address that.

Comments

busterkeaton wrote on 4/22/2008, 9:55 AM
I love that song.
Have you ever heard Steve Earle's version?
http://www.amazon.com/Return-Grievous-Angel-Tribute-Parsons/dp/B00000JMXD
Do you guys play Six Days on the Road?

There's video noise, of course, and that's always problematic when compressing once to an upload file (wmv9), then again "on the fly" as it's uploaded to Flash. But I think I'm seeing some interlace artifacts, too, and wondering what I might've done to address that.

You can throw a lot more bits at the video to get higher quality. Your resulting file size was only 18 meg. The smaller file size limit at YouTube is 100 meg, so you can increase the bitrate way higher. I don't think Google Video has a size limit. Google actually recommends mp4 files at 750K.

There are two ways to upload your video: by using our Single File Uploader and the YouTube Uploader. Depending on which upload method you choose, your videos can be up to 100MB or up to 1GB.

If you know that your file is going to be re-encoded, to low bitrate Flash, you want to preserve as much quality as possible when you render the file on your side. There's bitrate calculators you can find on the web which we tell you how big the resulting file will be before you render it.
Jeff B wrote on 4/22/2008, 1:29 PM
Here's six days on the road:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3940899243534752174

Re: higher bitrates... I've found that the biggest hit to anything I upload to either YouTube or Google Video is any video noise, regardless of higher or lower bitrates. So, what I shoot for is less hard-edged pixels... try to make it look smoother... a softer look to the file I upload.

Meanwhile, though, on the one I posted originally about, I'm wondering if anyone else sees any interlace artifacting that resulted from my possible mis-handling of the interlaced source while working in Vegas. I'm thinking that the first stage project settings maybe should be slightly different, and how I set that up maybe has an impact on what I render to, regardless of the settings in the render setup.

I'm still unlearning all my editing habits from MediaStudio Pro... I can't help but think that the first stage project settings need to "match" the source material as closely as possible. Is that the wrong basic paradigm with Vegas?