TheatreUnleashed

About a year ago the FOD team said the following on this forum:

(BEGIN... more »

About a year ago the FOD team said the following on this forum:

(BEGIN QUOTE)
here's some tips on getting the best out of your videos:

Your video should be at least 464x348 pixels to make sure we don't have to stretch it to fit our player (shrinking down is no problem). The aspect ratio should be 4:3 or 16:9. Finally, 30fps is best, and if you want your video to look as good as possible, don't use the H.264 codec (the newest Quicktime Standard) because it compresses it too much. Try less compression with the Mpeg-4 codec and the QuickTime container format.
(END QUOTE)

For a few days now, I've been trying to upload a video that looks amazing on my computer (it was shot in HD, with good lighting, etc.). I've tried it in a bunch of different formats:

* the one suggested by the FOD guys (MP4), at all kinds of different resolutions ranging from 720p to 640x360
* a bunch of different combinations of AVI, MOV, etc., also with a bunch of different sizes
* H.262 (some users have reported that works well for them)
* and even without compression!!! (at 640x360, w/ a test upload of 1.45 seconds = 29 MB file)

The problem is that even though *all* of these formats looked really nice on my computer, when I uploaded the files to FOD, they looked absolutely awful: compression artifacts all over the place, etc. It looks like this is happening when they convert the video to flash, and there must be something funny going on because even my uncompressed upload looked awful once it was up on the site. In fact, it looked just as awful as my other attempts, which makes me think that the poor quality has nothing to do with the amount of compression I'm using on my files.

Of course there are some formats that do work well on FOD -- for instance, the Dennis Leary video that showed up on the front page yesterday (Great Moments in Irish History with Denis Leary from FOD Team) looks much, MUCH better than mine does. So how did they do that? What format was that video uploaded in?

This is where I'm hoping to get some help from the community: if you've had decent results with your uploads, I would love to hear from you. Could you please post a link to your video, and as much information as you can muster about the program, codec, parameters, etc. you used?

I'm sure others would find this information useful as well -- we all want to contribute high-quality content, and have people view our work at sufficient (if not optimal) quality.

Thanks in advance!

p.s. One suggestion for the FOD developers: it would be great if you guys allowed .flv uploads. That way people could be sure that whatever they upload won't be re-compressed or messed with in any way... That would be GREAT and save people lots of time re-uploading and trying different formats, etc.

Fod Team said:

here's some tips on getting the best out of your videos:

Your... more »

Fod Team said:

here's some tips on getting the best out of your videos:

Your video should be at least 464x348 pixels to make sure we don't have to stretch it to fit our player (shrinking down is no problem). The aspect ratio should be 4:3 or 16:9. Finally, 30fps is best, and if you want your video to look as good as possible, don't use the H.264 codec (the newest Quicktime Standard) because it compresses it too much. Try less compression with the Mpeg-4 codec and the QuickTime container format.

Fod Team said:

here's some tips on getting the best out of your videos:

Your... more »

Fod Team said:

here's some tips on getting the best out of your videos:

Your video should be at least 464x348 pixels to make sure we don't have to stretch it to fit our player (shrinking down is no problem). The aspect ratio should be 4:3 or 16:9. Finally, 30fps is best, and if you want your video to look as good as possible, don't use the H.264 codec (the newest Quicktime Standard) because it compresses it too much. Try less compression with the Mpeg-4 codec and the QuickTime container format.