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MillimeterSorenson Media Squeeze Beta Sight
Nov 20, 2009 12:00 PM, By Alan Robinson, owner of Bonnie Blink Productions
Compression for the event videographer.
Figure 1. The Audiences window at the top left of Sorenson Media Squeeze allows you to easily find presets arranged by format or workflow as well as your custom presets.
Wedding and event videography is a field that is becoming increasingly sophisticated as we move further into the online age. Many brides today not only desire a video of their wedding, but they want it to be a mini-movie with high production values. In addition, they would like the wedding video on Facebook, their Apple iPhone, DVD, and Blu-ray. This presents a new and unique challenge for the studio. In wedding videography, unlike film production or corporate video, nothing is staged and there are no retakes. We have to work with ambient light (particularly in churches), and we have limited control over audio. On the other hand, the bar is constantly being raised for both artistry and production quality. HD is a given now, and the best videographers are producing amazingly film-like work.
My company, Bonnie Blink Productions, in West Chester, Pa., does upscale wedding videography for clients throughout the Philadelphia area. We film with the Canon XH A1 in 24p HDV. Editing is on an Apple Mac platform using Apple Final Cut Studio. We output the finished product to DVD, Blu-ray, web video, and QuickTime for the iPod and iPhone.
Apple supplies Compressor as part of Final Cut Studio, and while it is a good video encoder, Compressor cannot output Adobe Flash. This was a problem for us as we prefer to use Flash for all of our web video.
Enter Squeeze
After trying a few Flash encoding utilities, we purchased a copy of Sorenson Media Squeeze for the purpose of producing .flv (Flash video) files to upload to the website.
One feature that is quite useful is the Audiences window at the top left. (See Figure 1.) This allows you to easily find presets arranged by format or workflow as well as your custom presets. The standard presets in this window are a good starting point for almost any project. Squeeze can encode Flash (FLV and SWF), QuickTime, Windows Media, and H.264 for the Web; MPEG-2 for DVD; MPEG-2, H.264, and VC-1 for Blu-ray; as well as formats for mobile devices, broadcast, and content-delivery networks.
Figure 2. These are good initial settings for web video.
Creating good web video starts with a pristine source. The Final Cut timeline is first rendered to a 1920x1080 ProRes 422 file. We then add this file to the Squeeze batch tree for processing. For Flash encoding, Squeeze provides a choice of the Sorenson Media Spark or On2 Technologies VP6 codecs. (See Figure 2 for a typical setup.)
First, make sure that the Format Constraint (upper left hand side of window) is set to Adobe Flash 8 (FLV). Audio should be Fraunhofer MP3 at 128kbps to 192kpbs. The video parameters used are:
- Codec: On2 VP6
- Method: 2-pass VBR
- Data Rate: 768kbps to 1000kpbs
- Frame size: 640x360 (A good size for web delivery of 16:9 material)
- Key Frame: vary 90 to 300 frames
- Profile: VP6-E
- Compression Speed: Best.
Although this profile has produced excellent results for us, we have recently been encoding our web video in MPEG4 using the H.264 codec. This results in a smaller file size at an equivalent data rate with high quality.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.
