STREAMING HDV FOR WEB

all this wringing of hands and gnashing of teeth could be seen as a bit useless without some hard facts.
so i'll ask some questions that maybe can be answered:

Diego,
DID you find a way to satisfactorily compress your HDV for YouTube?
what was it?

if you weren't satisfied, i'd be curios to hear what you diid anyway.

Tim,
you say you use Mpeg Streamclip.
could you elaborate on that.


thanks,
nick

OK. Here's what I do and I do it because it's easy and provides decent results. I'm gonna do this while I write it down so I've taken a 2'30" 1080p24 HDV segment and dropped it into a new NTSC DV50 timeline (to get the letterbox baked into the cake). Then I rendered and output a new QT movie (now NTSC 4:3 23.98fps) which is 852.2 MB and am now going to pop it onto the landing pad of MPEG Streamclip.

1. File -> export to MPEG 4
2. Settings:
Compression: H.264 Encoder
Quality: 100%
Sound: MPEG-4 AAC Stereo Auto 128kbps
Frame Rate: 23.98
Frame Size: Other (320x240)
Checkboxes:
Frame Blending: YES
Better Downscaling: YES
Interlace Scaling: NO
3. Press the "Make MP4" button
4. Name and save to desktop

This particular instance resulted in a 56.6 MB file size. Well under the 100MB limit. So if this were a 6:00 show to begin with, you can see that it would be over the limit. In that case, I would have also checked the "Limit Data Rate" checkbox and probably started at 5000kbps.

Then worked my way down from there until I was under the 100MB limit, usually after the second go 'round or the first if you actually care to lay out all the math.

As a side note, if you start with "file -> export to Quicktime" and select "H.264" from the drop-down menu, and use all the exact same settings, the file ends up at 76.2 MB. I played them expanded side by side and could not detect any difference between them, though there must've been something for the extra 20MB.

In this case I used a DV50 QT movie to start instead of DV25. This is nearly the same info as the tutorial by Phil Hodgetts that is often linked:

Phil Hodgetts method

with all the settings transfered to MPEG Streamclip. I do it in Streamclip because I can knock off a bunch of QT movies in a row or keep re-doing the same one until I get the desired result.

Seems like a lot of steps, why don't you take your original export, in its original format, drop it into Compressor and set up a one-step pre-step that will produce a letterboxed 320x240 at an acceptable file size under 100MB.

Hi Tom,
It only sounds like a lot of steps. It just takes a few minutes.

As for the Compressor method, I don't have Comp 3.0 on my home system yet so anything done in it (Comp 2.3) seems to take forever. And I couldn't figure out how to get a letterbox 4:3 straight from an HDV (or XDCam HD) timeline. I do have Comp 3.0 on my MBP at work, though, so I'm looking forward to getting a chance to test all that soon.

If you know how to solve the letterbox-4:3-from-an-HD-timeline issue, I appreciate hearing that. I'm not exactly a whiz when it comes to Compressor but I know they've made 3.0 easier to use with all the new pre-sets and such.

Don't worry about the letterboxing. Change the output geometry to widescreen, like 640x360. YouTube is going to recompress and letterbox it anyway so give them the highest quality, least compressed file you can deliver, one that's gone through the least recompression cycles you can.

I just made the compression with Tim's recipe and it definitely does the trick pretty smoothly. Ill try skipping the middle compression as Wolsky proposes the next time I upload something to you tube see what happens.