rendering settinngs for web

susanw wrote on 12/11/2003, 7:23 PM
I've been working on some small videos (3-4 minutes or less) for the school web sites I work on. I've been struggling to find the best settings to render the videos in Vegas 4. I've been using .wmv and have trouble getting the resulting .wvv files down to a size that the parents at my school will likely be able to view without too much difficulty. I'm assuming that a fair amount are still on dial-up, although many are probably on cable or dsl.

What I'd like to know is what settings others normally use when rendering videos for the Internet. I realize that it is not the same for everyone, but I could use a solid starting off point.

Do you use the templates that are available on the Rendering screen, or customize? What quality, audio & video settings, bitrate? Do you choose more than one target bitrate.

I think it would be helpful to many others to have a set of norms to go by with ALL the details to get the best possible quality for a reasonable file size.

Thank you.
Susan

Comments

chrisgrand wrote on 12/16/2003, 11:12 AM
Get the free Windows Media Encoder 9 and play with different bitrate presets for download format. This tool is much more flexible than the VV4 WMV encoder plugin.

I have been very pleased with the results.

Here is a link to the encoder:

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=5691ba02-e496-465a-bba9-b2f1182cdf24&DisplayLang=en

If the link does not work, just search the Microsoft site for Media Encoder.

Jsnkc wrote on 12/16/2003, 11:37 AM
Also when doing web videos it is a good idea to have some options for the end user, say one video encoded for 56K and another for broadband, that way the broadband users aren't stuck with bad video and the dialup users don't have to wait forever to see the video. Also if there are some MAC users it is a good idea to have Quicktime videos 56K and boradband.
MUTTLEY wrote on 12/16/2003, 1:37 PM
While not a cheap solution, I have had great results with " Sorenson Squeeze " ( http://www.sorenson.com/ ) Being able to tweak the settings and render multiple file formats at the same time, and even output as flash is amazing. If you go to my site ( http://www.undergroundplanet.com/home.htm ) the flash in the upper right corner was produced in Vegas, rendered as an avi, than imported into Sorenson and output as a flash movie. I was very into Flash years ago but was absolutly lost the last time I opened it. If ya dig around all the vids on my site were rendered with Sorenson as well. Maybe there are better solutions but I'm sold on this program.

- Ray
ray@undergroundplanet.com
www.undergroundplanet.com