Encoding video for the web has been a pain in the butt for every Internet Marketer (or their editor). There is actually an art to balancing picture quality with file size. Some people even tweak these settings to get some interesting and artistic effects. Check it out:
We won’t be getting the results in that video, we want a good looking picture with a small file size. Here’s the settings I use to get videos that look like this:
I create .mp4 files using the H.264 format, the data rate set to 1500 kbits/sec, although I do sometimes set the data rate to 2000 (smoother looking fades, larger file size though), if it’s for Youtube, I export the resolution at 1280×720. If it’s for our own site, I export it at 600×360. The frame rate is 30 frames per second.
Remember to pick your own screen resolutions, we are using HD footage so that’s why we export at 1280×720 or 600×360 respectively. But why 600×360? We use this resolution because our final video (the video on the site) is actually going to be smaller than that (450×253). You always want your video file to be a larger resolution than your final video (the one on the site).
With the settings mentioned above, we are getting a high def video that’s 4 minutes, 41 seconds long at 72MB.
We use Mike Stewart’s S3 Media Player to upload our videos and have no complaints so far. Another option is EZS3.
Feel free to ask me more questions if you have them; just leave them in the comments.
