Home video to flv - quality loss and file size

[Bain80]

I'm making a website from my home videos. The videos are 1080p avchd and look great. I import them into Adobe premiere pro for editing and I have tried saving as 1080p and 720p. Both times I get some quality loss but it looks ok. Then I use adobe media encoder to turn them into flash files for the website, again losing quality. The 720p file size ends up being about 26mb per minute.

I understand losing quality but my concern is that I can go on youtube and find a hundred 1080p videos that look amazing that end up being about 25mb per minute. I'm losing significant quality and not getting any savings on the file size. If I'm going to have 25mb per minute video I'd love to have the quality and resolution of the 1080p. Or if I'm going to have lower video quality I'd like my file sizes to be much smaller. What am I doing wrong? What is the best process to maintain quality without having huge video files? Thanks

[jagabo]

You didn't say exactly what you're shooting, what you're shooting with, and how. But handheld, shaky, noisy, interlaced camcorder video doesn't compress as well professionally shot film. Everything you can do to reduce noise and motion will reduce the bitrate requirement.

[poisondeathray]

how "shaky" are your videos? did you use a stabilizer or tripod ?

how "noisy" are your video ? adequate lighting and exposure ?

These are the 2 most common variables that impair compression efficiency with "home videos"


Are you encoding from the original project or from the export ? (If you export from the original files, you will get better quality than if you exported a video then used AME in a second stage to export into flash flv) . Flash supports .mp4 so you can export that directly

Some people choose to use other encoders that are more efficient . x264 will give you better results than the mainconcept encoder from AME (either higher quality at the same filesize, or same quailty at lower filesize) . What you could do is export uncompressed then use a GUI x264 e.g. staxrip, megui, ripbot, handbrake, xvid4psp etc....

[Bain80]

Thank you for the replies. I recently got married in Hawaii and wanted to post some videos. The camera was not used with a tripod, but in most cases the person with the camera wasn't moving either so they aren't really shaky. The camera is a panasonic HDC-TM60. The videos look quite good in the original avchd format, they are mostly outdoor in bright light.

I'm not really expecting them to look like professionally shot film, I'm more just trying to find the best way to get quality per filesize.

I will be sure to try what you suggested, I'm guessing it will help at least some. I'll let you know if it works better.