Any Sorenson Squeeze Experts? re: FLV ?

[sdsumike619]

I created a demo DVD for a musician, about 30 mins long, broken into 5 or 6 titles, the most being about 6 minutes long. I created the entire project on a Vegas 5.0 timeline. The musician now wants to have that DVD on his website.

My question is basically how to create the best looking FLV files using Squeeze 4.2 with the Spark Pro codec. What should I encode the video to from Vegas? I read an article that told me to encode to FLV from DV AVI - is this correct? It also said to encode it as progressive since it will be viewed on the computer, however, I tried that and the video flickers and looks bad. it sure looks better with the field order set to either lower or upper..

I guess the bottom line is I'm looking for the process to get good looking FLV video from what I have on my Vegas timeline starting from what I should encode the timeline to, and then the settings to use in Squeeze...

Any help is greatly appreciated...

[celtic_druid]

You should deinterlace and for the best looking flv, forget sorenson spark and use On2's VP6.

[Richard_G]

I use Sorensen to encode to 512k streaming format FLV with a resolution of 320 x 240. Depending on the source, I either input as 320 x 240 AVI compressed slightly with Huffyuv or as full PAL DVD resolution interlaced mpeg2 (720 x 576). I don't deinterlace first as Sorensen deals with the deinterlacing during the encoding to FLV. No matter which format I start with the end results are fine.

[sdsumike619]

well I don't have the license for the On2 VP6 plugin so I'm going with the Spark Pro ; so you think I should download the Huffy avi codec and encode to that first?

[sdsumike619]

I got the huffy avi codec - what settings should I put on it in its configuration to get the best FLV file later?

[mpiper]

I attended MAX 2005 and the Flash video programmers actually said Quicktime Animation at highest settings was the best for using as a source for flv files. (It surprised me, but that's what they said.)

other than that, uncompressed is the best possible format, but from the original edit in Vegas.

I like Richard G's setting, since that eliminates the interlaced question and should stream for most broadband connections pretty well.

[sdsumike619]

well how does "compressed slightly" translate into what settings to use in the huffy codec? Interesting about the quicktime, might have to try that! What exactly would be the highest setting in quicktime? just 100% quality or?

[whitejremiah]

erm....huffyuv is completely lossless...WAY too big for streaming, can you use streaming WMV (maybe even DRM'ed) if that's the case, you can just source everything from the dvd itself, and convert from there....

[sdsumike619]

I know huffyuv is lossless, we're talking about what to render the timeline to in vegas so that i can import it into Sorenson, and what format makes the best file type to import to go to FLV

[Richard_G]

In Huffy, I set the slider to 95% and leave everything else at the default settings. This is when using an analogue capture as the source. As the final flv wants to be in 320 x240, I capture at that resolution. I then import the captured avi into Sorensen to get to flv.

If the source is DVD, I rip as compliant mpeg2, import that and let Sorensen do the work.

[sdsumike619]

Will sorenson import ac3? If so, I could import the m2v and ac3 files or?

[celtic_druid]

Appears to take input via dshow. So it should be able to handle MPEG2 and AC3 just fine. Providing that is you have dshow filters installed to handle them.

Flash 8 comes with a free converter that supports VP6. No 2 pass from recollection, but 2 passes only makes a difference on longer clips with lotsa scene changes and it (VBR) isn't so good for streaming.

[sdsumike619]

no clue what dshow is;;; I just encoded my video to Vegas's NTSC DV setting and now encoding to FLV, we'll see how it comes out..

[celtic_druid]

dshow = direct show. Sounds like soreson deinterlaces for you. Doesn't mean it does the best job at it though. Don't think Squeeze can open AVISynth scripts though. The converter that comes with flash can.

[sdsumike619]

well how does "compressed slightly" translate into what settings to use in the huffy codec? Interesting about the quicktime, might have to try that! What exactly would be the highest setting in quicktime? just 100% quality or?

do you mean actually setting the encoder's video format to "animation"?

[guns1inger]

I can't offer you a solution to your settings problems, but I will offer this;

1. In my experience, flash is very poor for delivery of quality video at reasonable file sizes. Even adding jpeg graphics requires a relatively large amount of space or acceptence of realtively low quality.

2. Full resolution NTSC (or PAL, for that matter) at streaming friendly bandwidths (for anyone under T1 or better) requires an acceptence of lower quality, especially if flash is the delivery mechanism.

I think you have to be more reasonable in your compromises.

[sdsumike619]

no no no, it's 320x240 at about 400k and it's working beautifully now! PM me if u want to see it in action
mike

[thecoalman]

Here's spmething to compare it to: http://www.40lbhead.com/headfiles/albums/video/rockfest2005_empire_wandt.wmv

640x360 @490k, my personal opinion is to use a html menu. The only advantage flash has over WMV is you can embed a menu in the player and it's a little easier to hide the source files.

Provide clips for both broadband and dial-up users. If you want to provide a high quality demo make a demo disc with 2 or 3 songs on it and provide it in ISO foramt so they download and burn themselves.

[sdsumike619]

no way, see i have to sit here and wait for the WHOLE movie to download. With the FLV, it's progressive and begins playing almost instantly. The one you linked me to takes like 2 minutes to download and then it starts to play. FLV seems to be better all around, qualitywise too. I'm a beginner and my video looks better than that, so if i were mor experienced with sorenson, it would look just awesome.

[thecoalman]

no way, see i have to sit here and wait for the WHOLE movie to download.

That would be how you have your player configured or you're on a slow connection, on default settings MS Media Player will start playing that file as soon as it has buffered enough. Usually about 5 seconds for me.

I'm a beginner and my video looks better than that, so if i were mor experienced with sorenson, it would look just awesome.

That video is using 75% more resolution than yours, Comapre it full screen I'd love to see a comaprison... Have a link?

[sdsumike619]

no I'm on a 5mbps cable connection. It downloads the entire file and then plays it in the real player for me.

[sdsumike619]

worldclassmusician dot com

[sdsumike619]

tried http://www.40lbhead.com/headfiles/albums/video/rockfest2005_empire_wandt.wmv again with internet explorer, i was using firefox b4, same thing, the download dialog comes up and it downloads the whole clip, there's no embedded player or anything, flash is a billion times better.

[thecoalman]

It downloads the entire file and then plays it in the real player for me.

I don't think Media player classic has the ability to buffer and play.... Most will be playing directly from MS Media Player. As far as the quality as I mentioned that video I linked to has 75% more resolution (that's wrong though, it's more than 200%) and only 25% more bandwidth than you're using.

The embedded version is here: http://www.40lbhead.com/headfiles/displayimage.php?album=39&pos=0

....But whatever floats your boat.

One last thing, anyone a 56k is never going to see any of it since the files will be too big. They'llo be long gone by the time it downloads.

[sdsumike619]

ok that page worked with the embedded player... Can't really tell on the quality since it's really dark and blurry. And I put better audio quality too. I think the flash is better in case they don't have the player, for whatever reason it's only like a 1mb download, as opposed to windows media player which is more than 10mb if i recall...

[sdsumike619]

I'm taking a further look into the WMV format. In Sorenson there is something called MBR (Multiple Bit Rate) encoding for the WMV format which says this:

"One of the intelligent presets found under Windows Media is MBR (Multiple Bit Rate). The benefit of using MBR is you create one file, and it scales to match the available bandwidth, for example: you want to compress a video for the Internet, using MBR you create options for the available bandwidth (56k, 100k, and 300k) when you compress the movie, there is only one file. The people who want to view your movie do not need to know the speed of their connection."

Do you recommend this? Also, is it possible with WMV, to have one video player and be able to click on different video links that will load into that player? Or do i have to do what I did on the current page which was make several identical pages with each link loading that particular file into the video player. (index1, index2, index3...) ?

thecoalman, what did you mean by "my personal opinion is to use a html menu. " ?

[thecoalman]

ok that page worked with the embedded player... Can't really tell on the quality since it's really dark and blurry.

Dark, yes it is. That can't be helped as there was very little lighting. Blurry, eh afew spots but that's the auto focus. the quality of that video is far better than anything you're going to acheive. If I dropped the resolution to what you are using you could use a significant amount of less bandwidth.

I think the flash is better in case they don't have the player, for whatever reason it's only like a 1mb download, as opposed to windows media player which is more than 10mb if i recall...

As ospposed to your 20 mb of files? If you're really concerned with someing having to download large files as I suggested above at least make the page accessible to 56kers. You've completely taken them out of the loop.

[thecoalman]

Also, is it possible with WMV, to have one video player and be able to click on different video links that will load into that player? Or do i have to do what I did on the current page which was make several identical pages with each link loading that particular file into the video player. (index1, index2, index3...) ?

There's many ways to embed a player in a page depending on how you want to do it. Google it....

[sdsumike619]

The people that are going to be viewing the videos aren't going to be on 56k connections. Your broadband file was large too, wasn't it 27mb? Anyways, I'm trying that MBR setting in Sorenson right now to see what that comes up with... any idea about having several links to videos open in the same video player window?

[sdsumike619]

right, I know how to embed the player itself on the page, but what about loading different videos into it without opening a new page, is that possible to your knowledge?