Yes indeed, uncompressed 1080 is HUGE.

This is what I'm doing very successfully:

1. Cut up my video on the timeline
2. Use a slightly customised version of Jonnyroy's WombleExport.cs script to output a Womble TLS file
3. Import the tls file into Womble MPEG Video Wizard
4. Export the trimmed files from Womble MVW to your hard drive

The trimmed files are smart rendered (i.e. no quality loss). Only the very ends are re-rendered if necessary. And they are much smaller than your AVI options.

I have another way of looking at the "problem" -

Point - m2t original from the camera is going to be the "best" footage you can get - untouched, unsullied, unchanged

Point - m2t is a format guaranteed to "be around" for a while - it's big and is only going to get bigger

Point - SATA storage is down to $0.40 a gig (easy) and even $0.30 a gig if you look and wait for sales - and it's only going to get cheaper

So my solution is simply to buy large SATA drives - transfer all footage onto them - make your edited VEG selections - and leave all the footage alone, in it's original pristine condition, until you need it.

At $0.40 a gig you are only paying $5.20 an hour to archive your footage.
That's the same cost as the original tape (or less).
m2t is really the most efficient compression around AS WELL AS being the most beautiful, that you will get from your camera.

I say why bother with anything else??

OR... if you have thousands of hours of footage... make a tiny highly compressed "index" video for viewing only, and keep your original camera footage as the archive.
Write a simple text catalog of what's on any given roll to reference where to find "Mannie's birthday party", etc. and then use the index videos to search out your footage. Then just scan and redigitize from the original tape.

After all, how often are you going to want to get to the footage anyway?

Thank you all for your replies! And sorry for my delayed response I have been out of town.

I should have premised that I also have to go to flash files via flix pro http://www.on2.com/consumer/flix-pro AND I want to use as little bandwidth as possible but still have the video look good. Flix pro wants to see files in these formats Video: avi, .dv, .mov/.qt, .mpeg, .mp4, .3gp, .asf/.wmv (Windows only)
Audio: .mp3, .wav, .wma (Windows only)

So not wanting to be a bandwidth hog and knowing that the flix encoder is only going to shrink the file 40% I am thinking uncompressed avi is NOT the way to go.

I am going to save my m2t files but still need a way to render files to be rendered again for Flash. Ugh, I wish Sony just rendered to Flash.

Also what are smaller 16 x 9 pixel aspect ratios? Or is it called video dimensions?
Can I just take 1440 x 1080 and split it in half 720 x 540?

Agh! It totally sucks to be so clueless!

For the On2 Flix encoder, render from your m2t to an intermediate AVI first (1440 x 1080). Cineform AVI works fine. HuffYUV or Sony YUV also work but the files are bigger than Cineform and you'll see no difference in the Flash .flv result.

Don't understand what you mean about flix shrinking the file 40%. It depends on your settings but the Flash file size usually ends up hugely smaller than your source.

The pixels in your HDV files are rectangular (wider than they are tall). But with Flash you're better working in square pixels. So in your Flix "Video Dimensions" settings give it a 16:9 ratio, for example 400 width x 225 height, and it will come out looking correct (See this for a 400 x 225 example at 260kbps bitrate using the 1-pass On2 Flix Std encoder).

Half HD (960 x 540) is generally too big for web video.

Thanks Nick!!!!!

Yeah, not really sure what I was thinking with the 40% statement.

Nice video! Did you shoot that? What camera?

Can you give me other examples of "Video Dimensions" that would fit the bill for a 16x9 ratio? What would you consider a "standard"? BTW thank for the rectangular pixel vs square pixel heads up.

Basically what are your recommended settings for converting 16 x9 intermediate files to flash? Should I go ,flv or .swf? It seems that there are more options (internet wise) with .swf.

Also, have you done any 3GPP files for cell phones? That's a whole other can of worms! If yes, Any encoders you would recommend?

Thanks a million!!!!!!!

Thanks. Yes I shot that with my Sony Z1P in a Light & Motion housing on its first outing.

Consider a maximum size of 640 x 360. That's what stage6.com use. 480 x 270's a good one too. That's what Google Video use for the "download" versions. For a small video try 320 x 180 (same as YouTube). There are no rules and there are no rules on bitrate either. You just want to choose the size depending on the application and use the smallest bitrate you can that gives the quality you want. It's a good idea to keep the width divisible by 8 or even 16.

I get a little confused with the .flv/.swf thing myself as I have no Flash experience but if you want to put .flv on a website you need to make a player for it. I gave that .flv to my customer who embedded it in their Drupal site using a Flash Video plugin. I think maybe your Flix Pro can create a simple player (?). Flash Pro 8 gives the most options for creating players but Dreamweaver can also create some simple players.

Here's a sample made in On2 Flix Pro demo (2-pass) ($249) at 512kbps, 480 x 270 using Adobe's Flash Video Player included in Dreamweaver 8 with the skin Halo_Skin_3.swf

http://www.bubblevision.com/flash-video-test-Dreamweaver.htm

I prefer no border around the video and I like the controls outside the video itself. Dreamweaver doesn't offer such a skin and I was looking for a lighter-weight (quicker loading) player anyway so I made the following page with the Wimpy Wasp player ($25):

http://www.bubblevision.com/flash-video-test-wasp.htm

That's nice but it won't show the first frame of the video before you press play, which is a big drawback I think. It's supposed to display a picture of your choice but that doesn't work too.

I also tried the flv player but there's some red stuff across it for some reason and again it doesn't show the first frame of the video:

http://www.bubblevision.com/flash-video-test-flvplayer.htm

However if you can get it to work, the flvplayer has a full screen option (not implemented in my example).

If you have Flash Pro already then you can also investigate the Proxus player.

These 3rd party players make it easy to create a playlist of videos next to the player.

I'll probably end up using the Adobe player and "borrow" Flash Pro for a day or 2 to make a nice borderless, minimal skin for it.

To play flv files offline you can use the FLV player (different from the online one mentioned above):

http://www.martijndevisser.com/blog/article/flv-player-133-released

I haven't encoded any videos for cellphones but perhaps others here have.

If it helps, cell phones are a bit early yet -- various sizes and compatibility issues. That said, there are a few freeware & low cost prog. available for the main or most commonly used 3GP versions. It's similar to the formats used for PSP, Ipods etc., so a few of those encoders handle it too. Q/Time I think does it. http://www.access-company.com/ has a free utility to emulate previews on cells, but haven't tried it for vid.

Compatibility of flv files varies with the version of Flash installed & used for playback. Setting up a player in a web page/window can be trivial or complicated with the code for simple playback freely available. It gets more complicated when you include scripting or code to insert ads, user specified play lists etc. Flv files can be self contained, called by the web page similar to Real or Winmedia, or they can be referenced by or contained in a flash file itself (.swf).

I've seen a freeware utility to check the internal compression format but only in passing -- haven't tried it. AFAIK, there was/is one popular freeware flv encoder, Adobe's, or On2. An example of a site that uses a lot of Flash vid is foxnews.com -- it also shows a potential Gotcha, though I have no idea if it's caused by encoding methods, software, or the format itself... clips longer than 6 - 7 minutes I think are impossible to play to the end unless downloaded 1st & played from hdd.

Nick, Mikkie,

This is great stuff thank you! What about Sorenson? I initially went for the On2 encoder because it seemed to have more ability to create interactive content. But I think Sorenson has come out with something new that is similar to Flix pro.

I read something somewhere that said .swf files had some time limitations and .flv didn't. Not sure though.

2 or 3 months ago the general consensus was that On2 VP6 had the edge over Sorenson. Adobe uses On2 VP6 in Flash Pro. But Sorenson may have updated, I don't know.

Something else that might help - if you can do the necessary resize in V/Dub or Avisynth prior to your flv encode, you can probably shave a huge amount of time off your renders. I've not used the On2 encoder, so don't know if it's available to something like V/Dub or if you'd be better off to frame serve.

I know that it's usually better to supply the encoder with the max amount of data, but don't think it matters when the result has such a low bit rate.

"if you can do the necessary resize in V/Dub or Avisynth prior to your flv encode, you can probably shave a huge amount of time off your renders"

Wil my file size shrink significantly too? How would I use it? Crop the AVI and then encode to flash?


I did some intermediate encodes last night with an aspect ratio at 1.333. On the WMP the playback was in 4:3. The same file played back on Vegas came out at 16 x 9. I tried 1.000 and in WMP in came out 16 x 9 but would not go full screen. I fell asleep before I could check it in Vegas. What gives?

When i render should I interleave, every frame?

Mikkie's just talking about doing the resizing (and cropping if necessary) in VirtualDub prior to inputting the file to On2 Flix. Your Flash video file size will not shrink.

On my system the On2 encoder does not appear as a video compression option in VirtualDub.

My experience is that the On2 encoder is pretty fast at resizing and encoding and it's quite OK to feed it the full size AVI rendered in Vegas. I think Vdub will just complicate the issue for you unless you specifically need a Vdub filter that is not available in Vegas or Flix.

You could of course resize as you render in Vegas and just do a size-for-size encode in Flix. The end result will be similar.

You should remember to deinterlace your video before resizing. You can do this in Vegas (choose "blend" in the project properties as the deinterlace method). Or you can do it in Flix (the Pro version only I think).

WMP sees the pixels as square and not rectangular, hence the 4:3 display. Mine does the same. For your Flash encode you don't need to worry about that. The Flash file will appear 16:9 as long as you make the ratio of width to height 16:9 in the Video Dimensions dialogue in Flix.

Interleaving you can probably leave at default (0.25 seconds).

"My experience is that the On2 encoder is pretty fast at resizing and encoding and it's quite OK to feed it the full size AVI rendered in Vegas"

Now that's cool. Timed video resize in V/Dub vs Vegas or Prem.Pro -- the 2 NLEs were over 10 times slower. On2 must take the stream directly from the timeline -- something I didn't expect from the wmv encodes which appear to go thru Vegas filtering 1st. While I don't particularly like Flash vid, On2 just rose a few notches in my book. :?P Personally I've always had decent luck feeding the encoder the max amount of data and letting it decide what it wants to keep, though it can slow things down.

"You should remember to deinterlace your video before resizing. You can do this in Vegas (choose "blend" in the project properties as the deinterlace method)."

Just personal opinion, think halving/quartering etc the height does the best job, though some folks swear by doing it in Vegas, & there's a really large number of folks who've almost developed this into a specialty using avisynth.

Later versions of Wmplayer in XP & Vista can do anamorphic, but it's a bit different than what we're used to I think:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/howto/articles/PixelFrames.aspx
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/howto/articles/NonSquarePixel.aspx

For anything PC based PAR other than 1:1 is a bit of a hassle, and a lot of formats won't support it or have partial support. Long story short if you render to a 16:9 frame with a 1:1 PAR, tweak it to be a multiple of 16 both ways, should be cool.

Regarding the speed of On2 Flix, I guess it depends how much rendering you need to do. All I'm saying is I don't remember the speed being a problem when I was using it. But that's not to say Vdub isn't 10 times faster. There are free demo trial versions if you wanted to benchmark it.

Mikkie do you mean halving or quartering the height of interlaced video might give a better result than deinterlacing and then halving or quartering the height?

I have WMP 11 and it still plays Cineform AVIs as if the pixels are square.

Thank you guys! Awesome information! You're great! It's all in the details!

I will say that the Flix encoder seems pretty fast. I always do 2-pass and many times, once I reach 50% the remaining 50% just whizzes by.

Are there any tricks I can do in order to get file sizes smaller w/o too much compromise to quality?

Nick - I know you are in Thailand by the beach , you lucky stiff!!! ; ) I read your bio. Right on brother! Live the dream!!!!!

Mikkie - where are you from? What's your main purpose with video? Business, pleasure a little of both?

I'm in Northern Ca. 45 north of the golden gate (wine country) Santa Rosa to be exact.

Have you guys heard of Brightcove? Nick, you might want to look into this seriously.

http://corp.brightcove.com/content_owners/index.cfm

Well one "trick" you could try to reduce file size is a 15fps framerate. I assume your source is 30fps so it's half that and perfect for web video.

Thanks for the Brightcove tip. I'll look into it.

Hi Nick
Wasn't being a smart a__ -- it's really a pain to resize outside of Vegas, so I was really genuinely excited, encouraged to hear that there might be hope. Really :-) While I don't particularly like Flash vid, suppose there's a bit of almost inevitability to it, so yeah, one of these days I'll have to play with the On2 stuff.

As far as deinterlacing goes, an awful lot depends on your source, and how picky you are. :?P 2 interlaced fields are sort of 2 half height frames if you only count the data. Reducing the size by 1/2 or more, software in effect does a blend, tossing out 1/2 the data, or the equivalent of 1 field.

Probably didn't explain it all that well, but it does deinterlace the image, and it creates [in my opinion] a better blend. What I *jokingly* consider deinterlace fanatics go through a much more sophisticated process where only the areas of difference are altered, but, if you're gonna toss 1/2 or more of the data anyway, then toss more encoding to a web format, personally can't see it being more than a waste of time.

The avi format is just a dumb container with no native provision for recording the pixel aspect -- Wmplayer (or most any player) just shows what pixels are there, where prog like Vegas preview the final aspect, drawing &/or filling in the missing pixels. I really shouldn't have brought it up at all -- really just trivia I thought someone might be interested in so I included the links... those articles explain things much better than I could hope to do, & illustrate wmplayer is not at fault.

But then I'll rant for hours on the sheer lunacy of whomever came up with calling it pixel aspect ratios in the 1st place, which is why I just posted the links. ;?}

For small file sizes with better quality, I don't think there are too many hard & fast rules -- it's more of a wiliness to experiment, a bunch of little tricks, and experience to guess which tricks work well for a given video. Colors, subject, source quality, motion all make a difference.

One that might surprise you is capturing an analog feed directly to your final format might look better than encoding a better, full frame file - you can sometimes encode again at lower bit rate after editing. Another is that at very low bit rates, noise can help avoid artifacts. Sometimes I've found it gives slightly better quality to capture or encode at a higher bit rate to an intermediate format that has high efficiency &/or a customizable matrix ... The idea is the intermediate encoding does a better job of weeding out the data to discard.

Cutting the fps will always work reducing size, and it's a good tip. This other stuff might or might not work, so run short tests... When it does work you can reduce the bit rate keeping the same quality, and that will make for smaller files.