Rendering .mov (small file size/good quality)

[Ian Jones]

Give a few different codecs a go, don't use animation / lossless. Mpeg4 works well, I usually have good results. Try H264 aswell, although it crashes the program for me.

[Maive]

Yah I prefer mpeg4 or even sorenson3, but mpeg4 achieves a smaller file size with decent quality. However, I wonder though, on http://features.cgsociety.org/story_custom.php?story_id=3620 the quicktime download is 35MB and yet the loading time is pretty quick. How can this be achieved? Is there a particular way the video is embedded? Because I'm racking my brain over countless times exporting in After Effects and Flash but I just can't get the quicktime movie to show up on my page! Perhaps a Webmaster or Programmer can assist me with this problem?


Thanks~

[Fess]

Ian....

Much thanks for that, it MPEG4 worked! Got the size donw to 9mb and quality is great.
I'll look into the other codecs also.


How can this be achieved? Is there a particular way the video is embedded? Because I'm racking my brain over countless times exporting in After Effects and Flash but I just can't get the quicktime movie to show up on my page!


Maive......., how are you embedding the file? You can try this:

(change the url's)

<!-- begin embedded QuickTime file... -->
<OBJECT classid='clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B' width="320"
height="255" codebase='http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab#version=6,0,2,0'>
<param name='src' value="http://yourdomain.com/yourmovie.mpg">
<param name='autoplay' value="true">
<param name='controller' value="true">
<param name='loop' value="false">
<EMBED src="http://yourdomain.com/yourmovie.mpg" width="320" height="255" autoplay="true"
controller="true" loop="false" pluginspage='http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/'>
</EMBED>
</OBJECT>
<!-- ...end embedded QuickTime file -->

P.S. is that you in the picture? Simply stunning............

Regards
Fess

[Inker123]

From my experiance, Sorensen3 looks better than MPEG4, but only slightly. The only time I really notice a difference at all is in HD-res footage. Anything smaller, I use MPEG4 as it compresses better.

[Fess]

Inker,

Thanks for the input! :thumbsup:

Regards
Fess

[beenyweenies]

For starters, it's a total waste of time to be rendering out of After Effects to your web file format. If it's not perfect, you have to render all over again, which can take a lot of unnecessary time.

The best method is to render out an uncompressed, high-res version (using Quicktime with Animation codec or just plain old "uncompressed") and THEN, using that high res file as the source, compress for the web using something other than After Effects. AE is not the best app for web compression anyway. A good program for this is Super (http://www.erightsoft.com/SUPER.html), which offers pretty much every codec choice you'll want, works well and is completely 100% FREE. Use the uncompressed "master" you rendered out of AE as your source file in these apps.

The best flavors to use depends on the length of the video, the quality needed and your target audience. If it's long, you'll need higher compression to keep size down, and to make sure it doesn't take 5 years to compress! If the audience is AOL users on dialup, you need a very small file using no special codecs (Sorenson is a great universal codec pretty much everyone has available). That said, I like MPEG4 for most video stuff, and h.264 is supreme but takes a bit of time to compress. For the best quality-to-file size ratio, use h.264 (a quicktime-only codec).
Whatever you do, avoid codecs like Xvid or other specialty codecs. You and I may think they are cool, but very few people have them installed and playback problems are never ending. This is especially true if your target audience is business users, including production companies. They don't install these codecs because WHY WOULD THEY? No professional post-house uses Xvid etc. for anything.

If you notice some movies play very quickly even though the file size is larger, there's two reasons:

1. You have to enable "progressive download" when you output your quicktime and in the embed code. issues like this are exactly why you should use a compression program for your web videos instead of AE, more control and more options in the output.

2. A lot of larger sites have streaming media servers which do a better job of sending out the video quickly. Forget about this option, it costs a LOT of money...

[Fess]

beeny,

Great post. Thanks for all that information.

I'll look into super & the progressive download options.

Regards
Fess

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