It's 1080-60i HD and about 5 minutes long. I plan on primarily embedding it on my Wordpress powered site but it will be shown on other sites like indieflix.com (which also contracts to amazon.com for viewing on Amazon's independent film channel online)

Thanks for any help.

I rendered using the default mp4 template with a max and avg VBR of 768,000. The footage is 1080-60i and the resulting mp4 file is horribly artifacted when I play it using QT 7.6.2 on an i7 system.

Same with VLC (I haven't had luck getting VLC to play anything at the same resolution that Windows media player does, though - it's all low-rez with VLC - not sure if I need to set something in VLC's setup)

Are my mp4 settings incorrect? This is a 5 min clip.

Thanks.

I am not familiar with embedding video in Wordpress. What size is your optimal output?

A max and average bitrate of less than 1Mbs is ridiculous. Provide the output dimensions and I or someone else will give you a starting point using one of the AVC / MP4 encoders.

I'm trying for 640x480 output. However, I don't have to specify this in the frame-size parameters in the custom render box, right? (that says 1440 x 1080). I also have field order set to upper first.

I tried a constant bitrate setting but for some reason that setting doesn't show up in the 'description' part of the render box - only changes made to the average VBR setting show up in the 'description'. Should I be using constant or VBR?

I experimented with the settings a bit and this seems to look quite better:

width: 1280
height: 720
Profile: main
frame rate: 29.97 NTSC
Field order: none (progressive)
Pixel aspect ratio: 1.00
Number of reference frames: 2; use deblocking filter
VBR: Max 10Mbps, Avg 5Mbps

Video render quality: best
audio: 44.1k, 128kpbs (audio tab shows 6kbps, but I believe that's a V9 bug?)

These settings resulted in a file size of 162MB for about 5 mins of 1080-60i

Are there other things I can tweak to further improve quality? (bitrate?)

Thanks.