Rendering Computer Tutorial

cpettingill wrote on 4/26/2002, 9:27 AM
I'm pretty new to all of this stuff. I'm using VV3 to create some screen 'movies' for tutorials for my software. I used Camtasia to record a short screen movie of me using the softwre. Camtasia also adds an audio track of mouse clicks. I opened the .avi from Camtasia, and used Vegas to add a voice track explaining what's going on. So far, it all works great. The problem is that many of my users have only low speed internet connections. I need to render the video as small as possible, but still have the text in the video legible. (When I recorded the video, my screen resolution was 640x480, and I used only 256 colors). My resulting video needs to be 640x480 to be legible. I don't need my video to be streamable, just small. I can even .zip the rendered file to distribute it. What is the best codec to use? There are so many codecs, and so many options in each one. Is there a good reference about which ones to use and when? My options for output formats are Windows Media, Real Media, MPEG, or QuickTime. So far, Real Media and Windows Media seem to be the best, but they aren't quite cutting it. QuickTime (.mov) doesn't seem to compress tth="utput at all. Can anyone help?

Thanks,
Chris

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 4/26/2002, 11:19 AM
Real and WMV are probably the best choices for the most number of people to be able to watch them as easily as possible.

What bitrates have you been using for Real and WMV? To keep the text crisp and sharp, you'll probably have to use the 3Mbps template. At this rate, your files will be about 24MB/minute, or 2.5 seconds/MB. The 1Mbps template will produce files 1/3 the size, but the text may be a little too fuzzy.
cpettingill wrote on 4/26/2002, 7:37 PM
After playing around a bit more, I found I got great results with Windows Media Player format. The trick is in the custom settings to change the Format to "Windows Media Screen V7" (as opposed to "Windows Media Video"). I guess this is a codec build especially for screen cam movies. I can get a 4.5 Minute 640x480 video with clearly audible voice-over down to a file size of about 700K. (When I was using the "Windows Media Video" format, I was getting 8MB files with much poorer video quality).
safari_tim wrote on 4/27/2002, 12:33 AM
Can anyone who has used both VF and VV3 tell me if Windows Media Screen V7 format is in VF 2.0c?

I cannot find it.

-Tim
Chienworks wrote on 4/27/2002, 9:24 AM
Apparently not. The [Custom] button is disabled when rendering to Windows Media formats.
cpettingill wrote on 4/27/2002, 5:41 PM
I've since also found that the "Windows Media Screen V7" is not always installed on machines where Media Player is installed. You can download the complete set of Windows Media codecs from MS which does include this codec. I'm somewhat of a Media Player newbie but it seems that when I sent my video to people who had media player, but not the codec, Media Player automatically downloaded and installed the "Windows Media Screen V7" codec for them. I'm assuming if you don't have this codec already installed on your machine then it won't be available in Vegas Video.
Chienworks wrote on 4/27/2002, 7:27 PM
On my computer, it's available in Vegas. But in Video Factory you can't even get to the custom screen when rendering to WMV.
Cheesehole wrote on 4/28/2002, 12:06 AM
fyi...
you can download the standalone codec redist pack from MS to deliver these codecs to people without an Inet connection. (they want you to fill out a form first)

glad to hear the wm7 screen codec is working for you. I may be delivering some stuff in that format as well. let us all know how it turns out.