Need Sony Vegas to Flash video for webpage help...

[liberty610]

Hey everyone. I am doing a good sized video project that needs to be presented online in some sort of streaming fashion. I don't have money to push for a streaming server, so I figured a youtube style flash format would be the easiest route. I don't want to use youtube itself, as a lot of the video content will be put into a few 30+ minuet episodes. Plus I would like to practice some webpage skills I am getting into.

Here is what I have now, and the issues I am running into.

I have Sony Vegas Pro v.9 and Pinnacle Studio 9. I have used Pinnacle 9 and the analog capture card with it to capture the VHS footage I have in the DV AVI format. I then drop that footage into Vegas and make the edits I need.

This is where I may not be doing things correctly to get the best flash videos, but I tried this 2 ways. I rendered a 2 minuet video twice; the first was into DV AVI format (matching the captured video's settings) and the second time I rendered it into an mpeg2 file.

I have played around with 2 flash video conversion programs. Sothink Flash Video encoder (version 2) and I have a freeware program called Format Factory.

So far, I take either the mpeg2 or AVI versions of my video, they both have the same compression issues. I have been setting the aspect ratio to match the 16:9 of the video @ 30 fps. I also have tried different video sizes. My main one is I match the videos 740x480 size. But, I don't seem to get good quality video in the flash file unless the video bitrate is at least half the bitrate of the original file. For the mpeg2 file, that's 4,000 on the bitrate.

The issue is, the player that the Sothink program has, seems to run badly with the video bitrate so high. My laptop has a dual core processor with an 8meg cable connection, so I don;t have issues downloading the video. But when I try on one of my older desktops using the same connection, it runs terrible because the computer is older with a weaker processor.

My main concern is, I don't want people who have slower connections and/or slower computers to have to wait for a good buffer to watch the videos. So, does anyone have any suggestions on how I can make these videos look decent but buffer well on most systems? And is there a program about that has a flash player setup like youtube where you can switch from lower qualities to higher ones?

Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks in advanced.

[aedipuss]

youtube uses x264 mp4 compression. try the sony avc encoder and use a bitrate under 1mps for streaming.

[liberty610]

Nice. Thanks, I'll give that a try right now!

[liberty610]

Ok, I opened my edited project in Vegas, and looked through the Sony AVC encoder. Do I use a template for this? Cause in the template list, it shows several options, and 4 of them are for 'internet'. In the descriptions, it says 'Use these options for videos you plan to upload to the internet, like on YouTube,'

The 4 options are:

SD video @ 25p; 4:3
SD video @ 30p 4:3
HD video @25p: 16:9
HD video @30p: 16:9

I tried a couple of these, and after rendering them, I used both the Sothink and Format Factory flash encoders. I still need to use a high bitrate in the encoders to make the video look good without tons of compression on them. Should I avoid the Vegas templates and use a manual option of some sort?