website video

[brooksrobinson]

I’m working with a designer to build a website. It is going well except for the placement of my reel. We are having a hard time finding a balance between a low-quality (high noise and pixilation) video that loads quickly, and a high-quality video that takes too long to load. I’ve noticed that many of you have reels on your website that look great and load quickly – something that has been elusive so far in my case.

 

I’m wondering if there is an advantage/disadvantage to going with either Quicktime or Flash. It would obviously be great for this to be viewable on as many types of computers as possible, as well as (I hate to say this) phones.

 

I’d rather keep the material imbedded in the website as opposed to going through YouTube or Vimeo.

 

If anyone has thoughts on this including what steps I should be taking and how best to achieve the results I’m looking for, it would be very helpful. Thanks in advance for any advice.

 

Brooks Robinson

brooksontheroad@pacbell.net

[Tomas Riuka]

Hello Brooks,

 

if you're going with SD resolution, flash video encoded at around 600-800kbps should look very

good and load fast. Going HD resolution of 720p, 1.5mbits will also give you great quality

and load pretty much fast (vimeo uses around 1.5 mbit for their movies).

 

I'd vote for flash, as pretty much every pc has flash installed, not like quicktime...

I'm going flash way myself with the link to youtube and/or vimeo next to the reel, in case

somebody can't see flash, like let's say ipad users.

 

Tomas

 

I’m working with a designer to build a website. It is going well except for the placement of my reel. We are having a hard time finding a balance between a low-quality (high noise and pixilation) video that loads quickly, and a high-quality video that takes too long to load. I’ve noticed that many of you have reels on your website that look great and load quickly – something that has been elusive so far in my case.

 

I’m wondering if there is an advantage/disadvantage to going with either Quicktime or Flash. It would obviously be great for this to be viewable on as many types of computers as possible, as well as (I hate to say this) phones.

 

I’d rather keep the material imbedded in the website as opposed to going through YouTube or Vimeo.

 

If anyone has thoughts on this including what steps I should be taking and how best to achieve the results I’m looking for, it would be very helpful. Thanks in advance for any advice.

 

Brooks Robinson

brooksontheroad@pacbell.net

[Mike Germond SOC]

I do primarily flash on my website, 580x326 for 16:9 video @ 1800mbps using Sorenson On2 VP6 Pro for compression. Seems to be a happy size and bitrate.

 

But realizing that a lot of our industry lives on their iPhones, I've made most of my site sensitive to that using Javascript code that detects if an user is on the iPhone and displays a separate m4v file for those folks. I just make that file using the iPhone export settings in Quicktime. The code looks something like this:

 

<script type="text/JavaScript" language="JavaScript">
 var agent=navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase();
 var is_iphone = (agent.indexOf('iphone')!=-1);
if (is_iphone)
{
document.write("code for iphone video here");
}
else
{
document.write("code for flash video here");
}
</script>

 

Oh, and the iPad uses the same browser as the iPhone therefore this code will detect iPad users as well.

Edited October 25, 2010 by Mike Germond

[Mike Germond SOC]

Correction, here's the code to include the iPad in the mix:

 

<script type="text/JavaScript" language="JavaScript">
 var agent=navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase();
 var is_iphone = (agent.indexOf('iphone')!=-1);
 var is_ipad = (agent.indexOf('ipad')!=-1);
if (is_iphone || is_ipad)
{
document.write("iphone video link here");
}
else
{
document.write("flash video link here");
}
</script>

Edited October 25, 2010 by Mike Germond

[Jess Haas SOC]

With QuickTime you can also setup a QuickTime referance file that will automatically select different video qualities depending on the device and connection speed. I personally feel like anyone working in this industry is going to have QuickTime installed. Flash annoys me so I avoid it whenever I can. Also it won't work on iPhones, ipads and apple TVs.

 

-Jess

[Sydney Seeber]

I know you said you don't want to do it, but the easiest thing to do is embed a Youtube video. (Vimeo doesn't play on shit yet) Reason being, you can leave what you're asking about up to them, you don't have to figure out what looks best on 10,000 devices out there, whether it be Android, desktop PC, iPad, etc. Youtube works on all of them. It may not be of the highest quality in regards to codec and whatnot, but it's just a demo reel, and for that Youtube looks just fine, and more importantly it's probably the least problematic solution out there as far as playback is concerned. Personally I'd rather have instant playback be the primary concern for demo reels. I wouldn't have said that even a year ago, but their codecs have been looking pretty decent lately. For critical work designed for a specific end user in mind, I've been testing a beta version of these guy's HTML5 option http://sublimevideo.net/ but there are limitations to HTML5 at present. On the plus side, that player also has the ability to detect the device that is playing back the video and adjusts the quality accordingly, which is the only way video playback of the future will ever work. The video device market is insanely fragmented and we're only seeing the beginning...

[Matteo Quagliano]

I did my website with iWeb and I put in 2 versions of my reel, one for iPhone added. The main one was done exporting from final cut to compressor an H.264 LAN Streaming file of about 35 Mb and a size of 480x270. I think it works good.

 

maqu

[brooksrobinson]

Thanks to all for chiming in. It seems there are many ways around this, but it is still very confusing for someone not versed in this sort of thing. We have been trying flash on the site, but getting very distracting horizontal artifacts, especially in shots with lots of movement (think steadicam shots). Not good. I believe we've brought up the resolution (?) to 48mps, but are still hitting the wall with horizontal lines/artifacts.

 

I have tried to stay away from going the youtube route due to quality issues, and Vimeo because some reels I've seen on there seem to stop and start often. I realize that these are reels online, but I expect that ASC DP's don't want to see compromised work, whatever the format, so I'm trying to make sure it looks as good as possible, while loading in an acceptable fashion.

 

Thanks again for continuing to help me figure this out. I'm still uncertain how to go about getting a clean look, while not asking someone to wait for an eternity while the video loads. Please keep you answers coming. As a last resort, is there anyone in the LA area that specializes in converting video to an acceptable format for the web? Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

Brooks Robinson

brooksontheroad@pacbell.net

[Tom Daigon]

Brooks, check out my website at www.hdshotsandcuts.com. I took full screen SD and HD 30 second shots and clips and used Compressor to convert them to H.264 240 x 176 files (about 3 mb) that are sharp and load like greased lightning. Since image quality and fast loading were my priorities, I am ok with the small size of the frame. Folks viewing my page have commented on how good the clips look. The bigger the images, the slower the load or the more compressed the image or both!

[Brian Freesh]

Brooks,

 

I sent this to a friend of mine who essentially does stuff like this for a living. He's always extremely helpful when I have questions about formats and whatnot. He has walked me through things step by step over the phone on more than one occasion. When he has time he will probably get back to you today with some great information.

 

Hope it helps!

[brooksrobinson]

Thanks to all who have volunteered their time to help me come up with a working solution, both here on the forum and privately through email and PM’s. Brian’s friend has offered to help me sort this out and will be looking at my videos and website in the next few days.

 

This forum is truly an amazing resource…people I only know a little and people I don’t know at all taking time out of their busy lives to help a fellow operator in need. Thank you to all who have helped. I hope to be able to reciprocate in the near future.

 

Sincerely,

 

Brooks Robinson

brooksontheroad@pacbell.net

[brooksrobinson]

So…I’m still in the process of dealing with getting my reels into a suitable state for my website. I have received a tremendous amount of advice and help through this site, so I thought I’d ask one more favor. The person that is helping me sort it out sent me a link to the newly compressed video for me to look at for approval. On his computer (a Mac) it downloads instantly. On my computer (a PC using Explorer), it takes several minutes to come up. This is obviously troubling, since I don’t want to alienate people who might be looking at my reel.

 

I’m wondering if those of you with a little time on your hands can take a look at the link below and tell me what your experience is – did it load right away or did it take too long? Also, along with your replies (in order to try and narrow this down), I’d be very interested to hear what type of computer and browser you are viewing it with.

 

http://andrewmuto.com/client_view/BROOKS/Commercial-Reel-4x3.mov

 

Thank you as always for your help. I really appreciate it and I look forward to hearing from you.

 

Sincerely,

 

Brooks Robinson

brooksontheroad@pacbell.net

[James Baldanza SOC]

Loaded AND played right away.

 

Mac G5 Tower 1.8 Dual

OS 10.5.8

Quicktime 7.6.6

[Mike Germond SOC]

Win7 64-bit, Firefox 3.6.12 - loaded instantly (played automatically), never waited for buffer

Win7 64bit, IE 8 - did not load (asked me to download the file)

OSX Snow Leopard, Firefox 3.6.10 - loaded instantly (played automatically), never waited for buffer

OSX Snow Leopard, Safari 5.0.2 - loaded relatively quickly in some sort of skinned player (did not play automatically), never waited for buffer

Win XP, IE 8 - did not load

iPhone 3 - loaded and played fine

iPad - loaded and played fine

 

I don't have anything else to test it with lol..

[Tom Daigon]

OSX Snow Leopard, Firefox 3.6.12 - loaded instantly (played automatically), never waited for buffer