Comments

[r]Evolution wrote on 9/4/2009, 10:48 AM
It's always best to start with the Highest Quality you can.
If you have the space you could go UnCompressed or Animation then convert to .flv
Only problem is - if your source is DV you're not gaining anything by rendering UnCompressed but file size. (you may be able to notice the difference in your generated text though) Since I work in mostly DV... I usually render out a 'Master' NTSC DV file as I have nothing to gain by going to a Higher/Better CoDec.

But all in all the info people will give you will be more from a technical standpoint of numbers vs numbers. I feel that the best way to tell where to start is by using your eyes. Compare the .wmv with other formats. Whichever looks best would be the way to go.

Remember:
by compressing... you're taking away.
I would much rather take 10% from 100% than to take 10% from 80%

Crap In = Crap Out
NickHope wrote on 9/4/2009, 10:54 AM
FLV is dropping in popularity now and will almost certainly never be supported by Vegas. Try AVC which can be embedded in Flash just like FLV can. You can encode to it in Vegas using either Sony's or MainConcept's AVC codec. They are not great codecs compared to others like x264 or more recent MainConcept codecs but they are easy to encode to in Vegas and should be as good as the best FLV you could encode.

AVC is also known as H.264 and normally is delivered with AAC audio in an MPEG4 wrapper. A web browser may well try to play it in Quicktime when it's downloaded, but you can embed it in your own Flash player or use a pre-made one such as the Longtail Video player.
Laurence wrote on 9/4/2009, 11:11 AM
FLV encoding is great, but I hardly do it anymore. The reason is that you can have a Vimeo pro account for $50 a year and embed your videos on web pages with no advertising. That way you don't have to worry about going over your allotted bandwidth with your hosting service and you don't have to worry about your server speed. If you don't care about a tiny bit of advertising in the corner, Youtube is totally free. I've just started hosting videos with Facebook as well. The quality I'm seeing there is simply amazing.
ken c wrote on 9/5/2009, 6:42 AM
I like the idea of vimeo, but they very clearly state you can't use anything commercial-related (eg business websites) for videos using their service ... (any insights on that?)..

another good alternative is amazon a3w? service, havent tried it though...

-k
Spot|DSE wrote on 9/5/2009, 9:45 AM
FLV is dropping in popularity now and will almost certainly never be supported by Vegas. Try AVC which can be embedded in Flash just like FLV can. You can encode to it in Vegas using either Sony's or MainConcept's AVC codec. They are not great codecs compared to others like x264 or more recent MainConcept codecs but they are easy to encode to in Vegas and should be as good as the best FLV you could encode.

Worth repeating.
deusx wrote on 9/5/2009, 11:01 AM
It would help if mp4/264 files rendered out of vegas were progressive downloads ( are they in the latest version? It does make difference.? ).

That way we don't need to screw around with third party apps a waste more time.