Website Online Video Samples

There are many factors and considerations involved when creating videos for use on websites. Some of of these include the following:
1) How big is the file size (download time).
2) How much CPU power and RAM will the videos require from each visitor's computer after being downloaded.
3) What format to use, to achieve the maximum cross platform/cross-browser compatibility.
4) What is the purpose of the videos, desired target audience, and what is most important. (e.g. for a band video, the sound quality may be more important than the video portion. On the otherhand, for a corporate presentation with only narrration audio, the video quality (i.e. number of pixels and/or framerate) may be much more important than having "Hi-Fi" audio).
5) Encoding a web video optimally requires knowledge and selection of various video and audio codecs, frame rates, data rates, pixel resolution, audio resolution, etc.


So because of all of these factors and many more, trade-offs are inevitable, and you simply cannot completely guarantee 100% cross platform/cross-browser compatibility.


Choosing between MPEG, AVI, MOV(Quicktime), etc., plus streaming media formats such as RM (RealMedia) and WMV(Windows Media Video) formats, I decided that the best trade-off was the use of the Real Media (RM) format. (I use this format exclusively for my band videos in the music section). As the Real Media players are available for virtual all operating systems, and further are stand-alone applications and thus have browser independence, the RM format offers the benefit of streaming video universally compatibility for both PC and Mac. For comparison, the highest resolution format on this page happens to be in MPEG, but the comparative quality of that clip versus the others does not itself imply that same degree of superiority in the quality of the MPEG format in general. Instead, it just happened to be the format chosen for the original capture, which was then later "down-sampled" to create the web videos in RM format. Compare the size of the original MPEG format (120MB) to that of the same clip's web-version in RM format (less than 40MB), and you'll realize that the reduction in quality is primarily due to the dramatically smaller filesize, not the format itself.

The biggest drawback with using Real Media is the company - the product itself is excellent. To read more about why I say this, click here.


So here are three samples in two formats you can compare: (If these clips do not play automatically when you click on them, you may need to first save them to your hard drive and then manually play them from there.)

1) SunsetStrip ( Real Media *.RM format) - streaming - LOW-160x120 (3 MB)

2) SunsetStrip ( Real Media *.RM format) - streaming - HIGH-320x240 (39 MB)

3) SunsetStrip (MPEG *.MPG format) - Very High Quality-352x240 (121 MB)
This is the orginal captured clip, which is VCD quality. In the realm of DV, VCD quality is actually a lower resolution quality. Yet for the realm of web videos, it would be considered very high quality resolution.

While the MPEG format is very compatible with most visitors, and gives very good quality; the trade-off however, is that a download is more than triple (3 times) the size of even the high quality RM version!

If you would like to see the actual broadcast/production quality of some of my video editing, there is no way I can do so online with this website. So please contact me so I can arrange for you to view an actual DVD I recorded, which would be the only real way way for you to see (and hear) the broadcast/production quality of my video editing services.