Again, I really appreciate you taking the time to write all of this up for me.

Your “Rocky” video could probably get away with 12-15 FPS because of the slow motion effects you used and it might even enhance the effect. It all depends on what Viddler is doing with your clip once you upload it.

1) Open the .DV in QuickTime Pro.

2) Choose Export from the File menu.

3) From the Export: dropdown, choose “Movie to Quicktime Movie” and then click the Options button

4) Make sure Video, Sound and Prepare for Internet Streaming are all checked and Internet Streaming should be set to Fast Start.

5) Back up in the Video area, Click on Settings…
Compression Type = H.264
Frame Rate = 24 fps
Key Frames = Every 24 frames
Frame Reordering = checked
Quality = High
Encoding = Best Quality (Multi-pass)
Date Rate = Restrict to 768 kbits/sec
Optimized for = Download
Click OK

6) Still in video area, click Size…
Choose a size or select Custom and enter a 4×3 ration. We use 480×360 for Beach Walks
Interlace Source Video = checked (VERY IMPORTANT!!!)
Click OK

7) In the Sound box, click Settings…
Format = AAC
Channels = Mono (unless stereo is important and you recorded with more than one mic
Rate = 44.1 (very important so your audio doesn’t sound like chipmunks on some video sharing sites)
Quality = Best
Bit Rate Format: Variable
Target Bit Rate: 64 (don’t need it higher for non HD video)
Precedence = Bit Rate
Click OK

That will result in very decent quality video that will play if transferred to a CD, stream wonderfully over the Web, and should encode well on video sharing sites if they have decent FLV conversion for Flash encoding.

At a format size of 480×360 this will end up being about 6MB per minute of video. We’ve tried lower Data Rates but start getting artifacts below the 768 kbits/sec.

I’d love to hear specific settings that others have found successful. Especially at the larger format sizes.

In the mean time, have you played with VisualHub? It’s basically a GUI to ffmpeg and is pretty awesome. Not a lot of fine grain control like what you get with ffmpegX. But you can turn out pretty decent .SWF and .FLV files. Drop a .DV on it and see what you get. We used to use it to do all our encoding but were getting skips with the WMVs and have gone back to strickly QT Pro. But I do still use VisualHub to stitch files together, batch a bunch at a time, and use the MPEG with the Tivo profile to make Tivo friendly clips that I can send to any of our Tivo boxes so we can show stuff to friends on the TV instead of having to gather around the monitor.

1) What’s your intended delivery medium? This site? Uploading to a video service like Blip.tv, Veoh, Revver, YouTube, etc?
Yes. And it will be going up on Viddler. Obviously I can save it as full DV and put it on a DVD as a “keepsake”. But for distribution and streaming it will be hosted with Viddler. (btw, this particular video will be a 6-part series that I did for Viddler)

2) How long are your clips? That will give us a target file size.
The first in the series is 7minutes and 30seconds after I’ve edited it. I am guessing that the next five parts will be about half that length.

3) Subject matter? Lots of movement and action or more talking head type stuff?
This first part is all outside while we are walking. Very Beach Walks like, though without the beach I’m afraid.

4) How’s the light? Lower light will encode as crap versus what you can get by with if you have a very well lit subject and background.
It was decent light. It is winter here so the light is soft but that actually makes for decent video.

5) Finish size? 640×480? 320×240? Or are you doing wide screen stuff?
I’d like it to be larger than 320 if at all possible. Not widescreen, I have an old-school DV.

6) Assume you’re not doing HD but want to make sure.
Read #5’s answer.

I hope this will help. After encoding quite a bit I’m starting to get fairly good results. Though no flash encoder that I’ve tried (Viddler’s included), likes .MOV files. I am being told to give AVI at at least 500kbps a try, but I haven’t yet.

1) What’s your intended delivery medium? This site? Uploading to a video service like Blip.tv, Veoh, Revver, YouTube, etc?

2) How long are your clips? That will give us a target file size.

3) Subject matter? Lots of movement and action or more talking head type stuff?

4) How’s the light? Lower light will encode as crap versus what you can get by with if you have a very well lit subject and background.

5) Finish size? 640×480? 320×240? Or are you doing wide screen stuff?

6) Assume you’re not doing HD but want to make sure.

Lastly, for your own sanity and to save time, trim a clip of the worst lit or fastest moving part of the project. Export as a DV (full quality) just that clip. I like to do 1 minute clips so I can estimate the finished MB/minute file size. But you could do 15 seconds and extrapolate. Then experiment with your clip.

LMK on the above and I’ll send some QT export settings to get you headed in the right direction.

Aloha my friend.

Now, I’m not sure who your intended audience is or how big of a file you’re looking for, but for me I can pretty much assume that whoever I send a link to has VLC and can play DIVX encoded files. So that’s my first instinct is to use the DiVX option and encode that way. I’m testing this right now, but I’m on a powerbook so my cpu is a little slow on this stuff.
I’ll report back with more info and a screen shot to compare quality.