Compressing for the Web - Best Practices

[Zeb B]

I am not aware of there being the "Ultimate Guide to Preventing Vimeo and YT Screwing Up Your Art" so maybe we at RU can create one. There is a wide variety of compression artifacts and issues even on a quality host like Vimeo. I often find myself asking: "how the heck does this video look so damn clean when others like it look like compressed crap".

I heard folks say "don't follow the Vimeo guidelines - they write what is best for them - not for you". Do you pre-process your files to game the host algorithms? What is your special compression workflow and secret sauce? Do you "Share" out of FCPX or go outside the program to custom encode the movie file with advanced settings? Screen shots, checklists and links are welcome! Cheers!!

 

[Nick Morrison]

Encoding for the web is totally the Wild West. I've encoded 1000's of spots for "Social Media" here at the network, and the following settings get me through most jams:

CODEC: Try x264, we seem to get better color fidelity than H264 (I believe x264 is some new varient of H264, a couple of the engineers I admire the most have been quietly pushing it for some time)

SIZE: 1920x1080

DATA: Minimum 10,000kbps and 2pass VBR (never do Constant Bit Rate)

AUDIO: 192 and above.

Be mindful of whether your source is RGB or 709. Most encoders seem to prefer one color space over the other (and few of them give many color space options to choose from, if any), so the best way to deal with this is to export your source both ways and see which way ends up looking better. Once you've found a workflow that works, you can stick to the one color space you've found looks the most "faithful".

Hope this helps!!

 

[Doug Beatty]

Here's a cool zombie thread candidate

 

[Zeb B]

Here's a cool zombie thread candidate

Yeah but . . . final entry was 08-08-2012 which is like 50 years ago in digital time ;-)

 

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Honestly the best results I've gotten as of late are just the Adobe Media Encoder presents for Vimeo/YouTube etc.

I'm unhappy with every option but those seem to be the least PITA.

 

[Justin Barham]

CODEC: Try x264, we seem to get better color fidelity than H264 (I believe x264 is some new varient of H264, a couple of the engineers I admire the most have been quietly pushing it for some time)

x264 is in fact an open source method for encoding H.264. As you've noticed, it produces excellent results quality-wise.

 

[Frank Glencairn]

I'm pretty happy with this: http://www.cliptoolz.com/fourK-Features.html