Video on web

[mrbelfry]

Hey there church webmasters.

Hope everyone is feeling fine. Here is my question. I have been asked by my pastor to put some videos on the website of him visiting some of our overseas projects. Has anyone got experience with video online? what is the best way to encode it (ie. windows media, mpg, quicktime)? What resolution should it be? etc etc anything I should be considering that I haven't thought of already - the video team use final cut pro so I assume they can export in any way I ask them to

thanks for any help

mrbelfry

[GuruGreg]

My advice would be to try and use a service like YouTube, Google Videos or Yahoo Videos, and take advantage of their API. Then you can use the <embed> tag to put them into your site per the API instructions.

[Faithhb_lutheran]

mrbelfry,

as a rule the smaller the better, what you have to decide is how much quality do you really need. I do a lot of video for my corporate clients and it's hard to juggle between quality and size. The way i do it is set a download speed. Say like I want 75% of my congregation to be able to view this video within 1 minute of finding it. If I have an older congregation with only dial up then that means I can only have a video size of 2-3 mb. Then you have to come up with a medium. For this example .swf would probably be the best as it can get smaller then most other formats.

Greg has a point with using the pro services but that means adding layers both to deployment and you code.

For anyone who has the money the new flash (version 8) has a new system for making videos web ready, they call it progressive download from a web server. I was able to take a 120MB .mov file and turn it into a fast running swf that is less then a mb in size, it also comes with an array of controls that can be added easily. Flash 8 sells on the adobe.com site for 600 new and 300 as an upgrade. You can also download a trial copy for 31 days. You can supposedly import any video standard but when I tried it with a .wmv the encoding ba gave me an end time of ten hours so I cancelled it ( the 120 mb .mov encoded and was ready for the web in less then 2 hours).

If you know flash this is the way to go.

On another note, Has anyone ever used the google or yahoo video APIs and if so were they any good?

One last thing Final Cut Pro exports as .mov files. amateur editors won't know how to get it to do anything else.

Hope this helps. Feel free to email me with any more questions.

[mrbelfry]

Hi thanks for your answers

I was thinking about using a service like youtube to host the video (we get our website hosting free from one of our church members so I wanted to be sensitive about throwing loads of videos on it).

Youtube recommend an mpeg4 at 320*240 resolution so I'll make that our start point and see where we get to

Thanks for the pointers

mrbelfry

[chrisb_ebc]

I've used FCP quite a bit and you can export Mpeg and Mpeg4 and H.264 for web. If you have the most recent FCP there are some good presets for web video you can use. FCP will not export WMV - you will need a plug in from http://www.flip4mac.com/ to get your FCP exports to WMV