Having issues choosing resolution/bitrate/fps of my videos im offering

[Pseudonymous]

Hey any video editors out there or anyone familiar with sizing your videos just right for your members area.

I am trying to make a video they can watch in the members area without downloading so I chose flv. My videos are naturally 1920x1080. If i keep things max, it's 350mb, much too large to stream because the video is only 4-5 minutes long. So it'd constantly try to buffer.

I am trying to find that right mix. I figured by making the resolution smaller, i could save some size, or fps, or something but neither of those effect the size of the video. The only thing is bitrate and bringing that down low enough to get the size I need for it to stream fine is 50mb and the file is shitty in 1920x1080. Well not really bad but im sure it can be better. My photographer told me he can make the quality better by making the resolution smaller but when i lowered resolution, i wasn't able to up the bitrate without the size going much larger again.

Sorry this isn't my area of expertise at all, ignore me sounding like a complete newbie.

Edit-- I would change the prebuffer time or something but that's not possible in ElevatedX

Maybe this is why people don't do flvs only and choose to go with allowing for downloadable content. In elevatedx (pretty popular cms), theres not even a bar on the flv that shows the movie is downloading or where its at so they dont know to pause and wait.

[Blackcrow]

What I do is I stream at 960 width (height varies depending on widescreen or full screen) and then I offer the HD versions as downloads. You can not notice the difference between the quality of the video when full screen watching 960 vs 1920 and streaming 1920 is not practical for most people. The fps are usually 23 or 29 for most videos and I wouldnt go below 23 because the video will look choppy. As far as bitrate you want to just convert a sample clip several times and reduce the bitrate until you can visually notice the quality drop - there is a break off point for most software where the video degrades and you want to stop right before that point. If you are using the same camera you should be able to find a happy setting and use it for everything. Hope some of that helps.

[Pseudonymous]

Yeah it does, thanks. However how come you lower the resolution if it doesn't decrease the file size?

And how does it make sense that the resolution doesn't make the video smaller?

[AJHall]

Elevated X uses one of the most widely used flash players (the JW Player) which is not something we developed. When a video loads in the default CMS flash player it shows the pre-loading animation with numbers showing the % that the video is loaded. It does this up to the point that it starts to play. You don't see this animation repeatedly as it rebuffers because it's not trying to "download" the video but play it, it just bottlenecks. I'll see if there's another version of the player or a way for it to show a rebuffer %.

You mention streaming but your description sounds a lot like a progressive download, not a stream. If you're not using a true streaming solution (we suggest Wowza as an affordable method) your flash videos will buffer and rebuffer while playing anytime an end user's connection speed is slower than our buffer/max buffer settings for the encoded video.

Unfortunately as blackcrow hinted at, there's no magical number that produces best results. Video quality and playback is highly subjective and what 1 person is happy with, another won't be.

Our suggested steps are:
1) Make sure you have a true streaming solution in place
2) Start with a video of 1280 and try to encode with a bitrate of 4000, buffer/max buffer of 5500.
3) If you're not happy with playback, follow blackcrow's advice and slowly reduce the bitrate by 300-500k and re-encode and do this until you reach an acceptable quality/playback level.

You could also offer more than 1 size of streaming flash video: 1 for those with fast connections or willing to deal with more load time for a 1920 HQ or HD file and a 2nd that's 1280, 960 or 720 for other users.

Give that a shot.

Anytime you have questions like this feel free to contact us directly for support and we'll be happy to help.

AJ

[Phoenix]

let us do it for you....as well you can offer much more content then just your own

[pornguy]

Great reply AJ as well as a great system. I actually learned something. Thanks