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Video For The Web - Settings, Tips, H.264
December 13, 2009
If you plan to put up your video files on the web there is one thing that you absolutely need to consider - H.264 encoding. If you are putting your videos on Youtube or similar service, then you need not bother about this. Youtube takes care of the encoding.
However, if you are reading this article, it's very likely that you do the hosting of your videos on your own site. Since Adobe Flash has started supporting H.264 encoding, you can have high quality videos in small file sizes. This means that the people who see your videos can get enjoy quality at lower bandwidths.
I shot most of my videos in AVCHD (Sony HDR SR7). I used Adobe Premiere Elements for editing. When the time came to publish the videos on to the web, I had to do quite a bit research to find the optimal path. If you are using any other video editing software, get a high quality DV AVI or MPEG4 file and then proceed with using Handbrake.
Initially I considered publishing in 720p. However, the people who watch my videos do it on their computer monitor and it did not really warrant a HD format. So I decided to stick with NTSC DV.
First a warning - do not use Premiere Elements > Share > Online option. It gives you really bad quality.
After getting your video edited and ready for publishing go to Share > Personal Computer. Choose QuickTime. Select "Local Area Network" preset.
Now you need to modify this preset. Click on Advanced. Set your Frame Width and Height to the source resolution. Note that you need to have square PAR (Pixel Aspect Ratio) and so adjust the Frame Width appropriately. See next paragraph for a bit more explanation on this aspect.
If you had for example shot your videos in 1440x1080 with HD Anamorphic 1080 (1.333) PAR, then you should set the width to 1920 with square pixels. (That is 1440 * 1.333 = 1920)
Set the Video Codec to H.264, Quality to 100, Field Order to None (Progressive) and bit rate to 10,000 kbps. Set your audio settings to AAC Stereo 44KHz. Now save your file and you will get a huge .mov file.
Download and install Handbrake.
Open Hanbrake and choose Normal Profile under Regular in the pane on the left side of the window. Now open the .mov file by clicking on Source > Video File. Modify the settings under Video tab to select Constant Quality 50.98% RF 25 by moving the slider. I found this quality setting to be adequate. If you need better quality, you can go for a higher percentage value.
Modify the settings under Audio tab to AAC (faac) stereo, 48 kHz, 64 Kbps.
Change the settings under Advanced tab to that shown below.
Change the settings under Picture tab to that shown below.
Now click on start to get the .m4v file. Rename this file to .flv and you can publish this file on your site.
The above steps in my experience has given very good quality video at reasonable file sizes. Hope these instructions have helped you in getting the right settings for video publishing on the web.
Posted by liveit at December 13, 2009 10:18 PM