How the hell...

[Ian in Northampton]

...do you get a video like the 'This Life' video (below) down to 1.43MB and yet have a reasonable size and nice quality image?

[FlippantBum]

I guess I'll field this question...well I imagine there are quite a few factors at play (and I certainly don't know what they all are).

The raw avi was about 150MB coming out of Adobe Premier 6.5 and was then compressed using Windows Media Encoder 9, with the following initial settings:
Distribute over a Web server (progressive download), Video-VHS quality video (CBR), Audio-CD quality audio (CBR), Bit Rate-300Kbps
After the initial settings I go into the properties of the video and change the frame rate from 29.97 to 15 and leave all the other settings default (size: 320x240, image smoothness: 60, etc etc).

I also don't know if this factors in, but the footage I used is stock footage from the Presenter's Toolkit from digitalJuice and they are all a resolution of 320x240 (kinda sucks for displaying on a projector, but it does alright). The background looping video is a jumpback from digitalJuice (resolution 720x480).

I was a little shocked myself that it was under 1.5MB and still in good viewing condition.

[Ian in Northampton]

FB, thanks: that's really useful information. I need to try that out sometime - although it sounds like the key first step is to get the resolution down from what I'd ususally use for authoring DVDs.

[mocharock]

If you are authoring DVD's that is a completely different beast. Compressed video for web delivery is supposed to be smaller in size and generally 12-16 frames a second and containing a bit rate of 120-300kbs. DVD you want somewhere in the range of 30Fps and a bit rate of 2-6Mb per second.

Like Flippantbum noted it is a good practice to keep your video aspect ratio the same as your original quality though.

[Ian in Northampton]

Yeah, sorry if I confused things - you're right, of course. What I was thinking was that all of the viditing I do is done for authoring DVDs. However, from time to time, I have this urge to share my work - or my daughter's work, which is waaaay better than mine (I was just on my way to bed last night when she said "Dad - come see what I've done" - but I was too tired to stop: I'll look forward to seeing it this evening) - with the forum. So my take is, if I want to do that, I need to go back to the original .avi from which I (she) authored the DVD, reset the resolution (noting what you said about aspect ratio), then follow the steps outlined by FB.

[Marc Peters]

viditing

Mike will be pleased!

[Mike Thorpe]

I'm so proud

[FlippantBum]

So my take is, if I want to do that, I need to go back to the original .avi from which I (she) authored the DVD, reset the resolution (noting what you said about aspect ratio)

I think I forgot to mention that the video coming out of Premiere was at 720x480...i just resized it in the compression through Windows Media Encoder.

The problem I run into is that the stock footage I have only comes in 320x240 Which is kinda stinky-dinky...however, when put to DVD (with the avi created in premier) it still looks okay...you can notice that it's not as crisp as it should be if they were the right size to start with.

[Ian in Northampton]

Marc/Mike: I aim to please... FB: thanks again. Daughter duly showed me her new tricks last night. She's now got 'cutting to the beat' (can't think of a better expression) off to a fine art: she's putting together the school year book on DVD (did I tell you that?) and she's doing the basketball team's video, with Aerosmith (I think) as the soundtrack. Nice use of 'small' images in different places on the screen, sometimes two images at the same time, sometimes titles in among the images. It really is very, very good - to my untutored eyes at least. On the other hand, the daft bint forgot to point Premiere somewhere away from its default for capture, with the result that my C drive (my D drive is the capture drive) is full to within an inch of its life.

The question came up, how can you change the number of video tracks in a project (the default seems to be three): I went to project, project settings, default sequence and changed the video tracks number, but nothing in the project changed.

[FlippantBum]

she's putting together the school year book on DVD (did I tell you that?) and she's doing the basketball team's video, with Aerosmith (I think) as the soundtrack.

Very nice....I wish I had gotten into "viditing" during high school and had those kind of opportunities.

The question came up, how can you change the number of video tracks in a project (the default seems to be three)

Well I'm not sure how to change the default from three video tracks...but to add more I right click in the timeline window and choose "Add Video Track".