Video and the Web

fosko wrote on 9/4/2001, 2:20 PM

I may possibly have a project to put the regular Sunday AM sermons fom my church on the web. My thought was this should be simple with Vegas

I'll record it on VHS and DIgital Tape (basic home recorders). Do some roudh, quick and dirty editing in Vegas. And them save as an .RM file.
Upload it to their server, and be done with it ?

Am I right or does this seem too easy and I'm missing something here ?

We are talking low (or maybe even no) budget here.

Thanks !

Comments

SonyEPM wrote on 9/4/2001, 4:00 PM

You can encode Windows Media, Real Media, or Quicktime with Vegas. Try starting with one of the preset templates as they are reasonably optimized for common web connection speeds. Make sure you post the files to a streaming server (your ISP can fill you in on that).

But otherwise its is pretty easy-

fosko wrote on 9/4/2001, 4:06 PM

Thanks for the reply.

What size file do you think a 30-40 minute video would would compress to ?
Any guess ??

fosko wrote on 9/5/2001, 12:11 PM

ALSO,
I'm going to be using my home digital cam corders. If I shoot with 3 cameras
(for different agnles and some basic editing to keep from beingtoo boring), is there a way to sync them up, or do I just haveto play them, line up the audio and lock the tracks ??
I would think this is the way since there's no way form me to put SMPTE or any kind of sync coding on my film, but I was just wondering.

Please excuse if these questions are 'ameteur', I'm a musician by trade and originally got VA, but have been having a lot of fun with VV.
Thanks

SonyEPM wrote on 9/5/2001, 1:03 PM

Your method for lining up multi camera will work fine- just sync up the files using the uadio, then cut or trim out what you don't want to see/hear.

Compression: file size varies greatly depending on frame size, frame rate, bitrate; try rendering a 10 second clip to your chosen format and then you can get a rough idea of the final size by multiplying file size per second x total sec. The number almost never works out exactly but it'll get you in the ballpark.

fosko wrote on 9/18/2001, 2:40 PM

Hey EPM, thanks for your patience, you'vebeen a lot of help.

I took my freonds video and encoded it for Media Player. It played fine on my system (which is always up to date), but wouldn't on his because he has the version of Media player that came with the first Win 98. What would I use for the 'lowest common demoninator' ?

One of my projects will be printing a video to CD for distribution and I need to make sure it'll be able to be viewed universally.

Thanks ~

SonyEPM wrote on 9/18/2001, 3:12 PM

MPEG 1 works on just about every system (Mac and Windows), as does Avi compressed with Cinepak. Those two compression schemes have not changed in a long time, so most systems should handle them. MPEG1 is probably your best option-

Chienworks wrote on 9/18/2001, 4:04 PM

Hello Fosko!

I uploaded our Christmas Eve service from our church to RealMedia
files on the church website. If you want to see how it came out, feel free
to browse to http://www.msbchurch.org/audio/2000xeve/

The service was recorded with a VHS camcorder and then captured.
I encoded all the video clips in VideoFactory using the 56K video
template so that modem users could access them reasonably well. The
quality isn't great, but it gives you an idea of what the service was like.
The sermon was 15 minutes 9 seconds and came out to be 2.5MB, so
a 40 minute sermon would likely be 7MB or so if you use 56K.

I chose RealMedia over WindowsMedia or MPEG for two reasons: most
everyone has RealPlayer installed and it streams effortlessly (ie. user
clicks and watches, no brain power needed), and at the low bitrates that
modems can handle, Real beats the other compression methods for
quality.

The church website is on my own web server, which isn't streaming. It's
just a regular Intel based PC running RedHat Linux 7.0 and Apache
1.3.12. But for the size of the files, it works well. A couple of things that
i had to consider for this approach though: HTTP will only stream Real
files at a constant bit rate. You can't use variable or multiple bit rates.
A streaming server would be able to handle all this, but would probably
cost you a lot more money to maintain or to rent space on. Also, to
accomplish streaming (as compared to download only), i saved the
video in a .rm file, and then created a .ram file with the same name in a
text editor and typed in the complete URL for the .rm file. The streaming
link points to the .ram file, which launches RealPlayer and tells it to load
the .rm file and begin playing it immediately. If you link to the media
file itself, then the browser will download the complete file before
starting RealPlayer.

I was uploading audio recordings of the services too for several months.
Sad to say, i finally discontinued the project from lack of interest. No
one was listening to them.