Video for web

[pjsssss]

I could do some testing but some of you guys that do this a lot should be able to save me some time. I have to put a video on the web with the following restrictions. Video is 5 minutes long

Max file size 50 MB
Formats accepted: AVI, MPEG 2, mov, or wmv
Video size on smaller then 400x300

What's my best quality shot?

[Mr Bill]

Hi Pat,

I did a test of a 5min clip at 400x300 @25fps and encoded it to MPEG2 & wmv.
Both came in at 45mb each and the wmv looks better to me.

Hope this helps

[THoff]

If you are putting the video on the web, then I would eliminate both AVI and MPEG2 for a couple of reasons.

First, they don't stream. People don't like to wait for a video to finish downloading before they can see it.

AVI also requires non-standard codecs to deliver good quality at low bitrates, and Windows doesn't come with a MPEG2 codec -- the Mac may be different, but you can't ignore 90% of the market.

That leaves you with WMV and MOV. Both can stream, and both offer excellent audio and video quality depending on your settings. I've encoded many videos using Procoder 3 to both WMV and MOV (using the H.264 codec for the latter), and sometimes WMV has the quality edge, and other times MOV. Either will deliver more than acceptable results, and I would strongly advocate delivering both formats to give the user a choice.

Another option would be Flash, but you didn't list that as acceptable by the client.

[pjsssss]

Thanks guys. My daughters High School was chosen the 48th top school in the US and World News wanted a 5 minute video of each school. My daughter did the one one for her school (I thought it was very good...I will post a link when it is up). She gave the video to her Video Tech teacher who is in charge of it and he apparently was not happy with his endoding so he gave me the sites specs.