Compressing video

Quote :

Okay, let’s get to it!

There are three recipes here from some “four star kitchens.” I promised not to give the names of the chefs, but, if I did, you’d drop that pan your holding. Seriously good stuff here.

WARNING: Remember this is a dark art and these recipes are only a starting point. You are free to add a dash of this and a splash of that at any point. And please share your recipes.

Read the whole MediaShooter article

Though not quite as witty or cheeky, I'll add a few things to this article. First, put aside a lot of time for your compression. While it's not a dark art, it is a little chancy and a single hiccup in your CPU or RAM could blow the whole project. You don't want to leave one hour for compression before you deadline only to discover your computer ate the whole thing. Give yourself at least a few hours.

Keep your audience in mind. Three major readers are commonly used: Quicktime, Windows Media Player and Flash. Know the pros and cons of each before you compress accordingly. Quicktime provides nice, smooth videos, but they don’t compact quite as tightly as the other two and is the native format for Macs. WMVs tend to be much smaller, but won’t run on many Mac, Linux or Unix machines. Flash offers some of the smallest sizes, is accessible on most any platform, but (currently) risks the greatest destruction of the video in compression. If there’s a lot of movement in your video, keep your keyframe rate high for Flash.