Help with video compression

skankerzero

So we're putting together a trailer for a game with a lot of solid, bright colors.

We need help with picking a good compression for the file.

We want the file to be portable. We would like to be able to post it online and have people stream it. I'd like to play it on my phone.

So any help or suggestions with making the video look as crisp as possible all while keeping the file size down will be appreciated.

Thanks guys!

Rens

oeh the jungle of codecs

there are two ways to do this really, you can either render it straight from the software pack you are using into a compressed version, using 264h for instance which mostly turns out really well, small in size, little loss and i believe most devices are able to play this codec.

but this will end up being a pain and taking longer, specialy cause your initial try ends up being way over budget, having to re-render ect. Getting a good estimated size is kind of tricky.

best way would be to render out your video uncompressed, and then use a compressor/resizer where you can be way more specific and control pretty much everything. Data per second, quality loss, target size, better compression with codecs, and you will never have to rerender your video and save time in the process.

Only problem is i cant remember from the topofmahead what the pack was called that i used.

edit// this is one thing you could use, http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/quickstart/video_encoder.html

Kwramm

definitely render out in single frames, or uncompressed (or any other lossless) and then use the tool of your choice to compress it (e.g. Super, Mediacoder, Premiere, Moviemaker) - after all you don't want to render it out again if some settings don't work for you.
H.264 is probably one of the widest supported formats, with many devices having hardware decoders for it. It compresses pretty well too and it's apple's codec of choice. There may be some other codes that give better results for videos with many flat colors, but as specialty codecs they probably won't have wide spread support.

FLV (flash video) can be streamed easily and packaged with a player (a la youtube), and many players can play it on their own. But I'm not sure how the support for this is on all the different mobile devices.

H.264 gets my vote for being most versatile. Use MP4 as container and you're set. (could also use MKV or AVI but it won't have that wide support).

skankerzero

I knew H.264 was our best bet, but it's just not rendering out as well as I would have thought from Sony Vegas.

We'll try rendering out to tifs and using that Adobe Media Encoder to see what results we get.

Any other suggestions?

3DLee

I really like Sony AVC for renders straight from Vegas. I usually render at 1920x1072 (1072 = divisible by 16 and YouTube likes that) and 26mbps. Even on YouTube it looks pretty good:

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LIy0IbVN07c&hd=1"]Battlefield 3: Friendly Skies Episode 1 (Helicopter and Jet Teamplay) PC Ultra, FXAA - YouTube[/ame]

bejkon

Try render out a lossless .avi from Vegas then open it and QuickTime Pro and compress it with h264 and see if you get better results that way.

skankerzero

Thanks guys!

Will try these out after work for sure!

xillyriax

In Quicktime, selecting "Export for Web" allows you to export version for the iPhone, iPhone (cellular, small bitrate version) and Desktop

aesir

skankerzero wrote: »

I knew H.264 was our best bet, but it's just not rendering out as well as I would have thought from Sony Vegas.

Question: when you render out in H.264 is the color all dulled out? Or is just a quality issue you're not liking?

skankerzero

it was the compression that we'er not liking.

Kwramm

I remember Quicktime had some codecs for solid colors, which compressed them really well, but you'd be stuck with Quicktime.

When using H264 have you tried a variable bitrate (VBR) vs a fixed bitrate?

skankerzero

oh man! thanks for the suggestions guys. They led us down the right path and we found a good setting.

Yeah, we messed with the bitrate some and found one that was very pleasing.

Hopefully you guys will see the final trailer up sometime in July.

3devo

yeah i've noticed(from my limited use) that vegas has some strange standard setting that try to be optimal for things other than quality(streamability and size mainly). however its not hugely difficult to change to get better results. generally files will be much bigger though.