Most people are right on this, some nice photography, but it really is essential to de-interlace for the WEB.

My only real crticism is that the video is way too long for a general audience. Also the film has a feeling of some music being placed on top of video. Try editing your movies to suit the pace and beat of the music and arrange your cuts accordingly, the final output will be much more watchable.

Good effort though.

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Thanks for the input guys.

Jammy, yeah, I know its probably a little long. Even though it used to be over 7 minutes I had to hack a lot more out of it, but could probably do with being a little shorter.

Thanks for the suggestion of Vimeo Yid. Will be using that from now on.

I am using Virtualdub to deinterlace my videos now, and it does a brilliant job. Just to find the best method of deinterlacing

Though I am still struggling to find the best compression to quality ratio method for creating a web friendly version.

The best I have managed so far is getting it down to 15MB, though I feel that is still too large and also the quality is not quite where I want it to be.

example London Butterfly House on Vimeo. Even on a broadband connection it struggles a little.

Between trying to get the compression right and trying to design my website, my time is just being eaten up, and not getting the chance to work on a new project. I guess patience is a virtue!

The Vimeo version is SOOO much better! You have a beautiful video here!

A couple questions for you.

Why de-interlace? What's the advantage of that?

What did you render to? I see these widescreen formats, and have no clue how you get that? Which codec is used?

The raw AVI files I get from Fraps are uncompressed, but m'thinks interlaced. I'm not sure. These are HUGE files! I tried compressing them to save memory in the editing environt, and used Virtua Dub's DivX codec. There was a noticable hit in quality. Did I do something wrong?

All this technical stuff is killin' me! I don't up from down, and I'm doing a lotta guess work. Am tired of that! So let me know what you rendered to and submitted to Vimeo. That looks awfully good for streaming video!

Thanks! Thanks for the superb video, and any info you can pass along.


p.s. The stuttering you see is not your video. It is Vimeo's server. I saw the same thing from their own how to videos. It's pretty sad that their server doesn't keep up.

Lengo, the video is captured in widescreen, but things like youtube use a 4:3 aspect ratio, hence the bars at top and bottom.

Yes, video files can be large. I have not captured video in Fraps as yet, so not sure whether it is interlaced or not.

I use Adobe (starting to use Vegas Movie Studio) and once I have finished editing I export it as uncompressed DV. I then take that in to VirtuaDub, where I resize it if necessary and de-interlace (these are done by adding filters).

When I saved the butterfly video with the deinterlacing, it came to 4GB for a 3 minute video, so I am sure I can do more to get it down while maintaining quality, but it is a temporary file so am not too worried about size.

At the moment I am using Any Video Converter for the last stage which is compressing it as .wmv file. Then I upload. The Vimeo video was 15MB. I am not sure if this is still considered large or not. Still learning here myself.

Not sure if any of that helps....

Okay, this is what I can tell you, and it isn't much.

There's a trade off between Total Bandwidth and buffering. The higher the bandwith, the better the quality, but more chance of buffering. Tests I've run led me to 640 Kbps to avoid buffering, and I have DSL with 1 Mbps, that's been tested and shows better than 1 Mbps download rate. A total bandwidth of 770 kbps resulted in buffering too.

THere's a trade off between smoothing and resolution (size). The bigger the size, the more smoothing you need. The test I mention above was rendered at 420x315, with best smoothing result set at 78 for this WMV.

I've abandoned the idea of having a private stream. The reason is that alternative showcases (blogs) are full of kids. I can't stand kids anymore. I'm 57 years old, and getting crankier all the time. So now I've settled on Vimeo. They have a mature clientele, and there's great community features. But, now I gotta render it at 512x384. So, now I'm running tests again to get

1. Bandwidth that doesn't cause buffering
2. Size with good quality vs the smoothing required (more is required, due to larger size).

I've spent the majority of today trying to get what I want outta Vimeo! Another day, shot to hell.

Maybe my life would be easier if I had a better renderer. I'd love to have Adobe's suite! I'm spending way too much time trying to get the sweet spot. Way too much, and I'm starting to go nuts!

If I were you, I would not be concerned about file size. Your stream buffers a little (and I've seen worse buffering from Vimeo users). I'd lower the total bandwidth if I were you. Just a tad. I'd also do one other thing. Add effect -- Bump up your saturation just a little, perhaps 6 pts. Your butterflies will rock. It's already great. It would be just a little bit greater.