Video tutorial: Producing H.264 video for Flash distribution with the Adobe Media Encoder
- 6-11-2009
- Categorized in: H.264 production, Video tutorials
This is the first in a series of video tutorials on producing H.264, in this case detailing how to do so using the Adobe Media Encoder.
Here's some background information explaining some of the encoding decisions made in the tutorial. First, the project involved a concert produced solely for streaming, so I shot in progressive mode. Hence no mention of de-interlacing. Since music was involved, I encoded in 128 kbps stereo, where usually I produce in mono at 64 kbps or less.
I was producing for Flash distribution, so I encoded using H.264 and chose the F4V extension, rapidly becoming the standard for H.264 Flash output. The video will be distributed via progressive download (hence 2-pass VBR) solely to computers, and is not targeted at iPods or other devices. For this reason, I use H.264's high profile. Had I wanted to produce a file that would load on an iPod, I would have used the Baseline profile. Of course, had I been producing for a streaming server, I likely would have produced in CBR mode, though that's not essential.
If all this sound totally foreign to you, check out the streaming media primer, here, and the Producing H.264 Video for Flash: An Overview, here:
ProducingH264inAMECS4_1
plz can you tell me why did you use level 4.1 ?
is there any difference between main and high profiles in quality ... and is there any difference between various levels when set to same bitrate ? (using AME, so no advanced settings visible)
Levels are important for devices because they define profiles to specific resolutions and data rates. Computers can play all levels of the High profile, so you don't need to worry about levels when producing for computers.
However, Premiere Pro will open an error message if your level is too low to support the selected encoding parameters, so you need to choose a level that's high enough to support the rez/data rate that you selected. That's why I choose a preset that's larger than my target rez/data rate - it makes sure that Levels won't be an issue.
The biggest quality difference is between the Baseline and Main/High, much less so between Main/High.
There should be no difference between levels because they don't apply any additional encoding techniques, like profiles do. See this page for more on that.
http://www.streaminglearningcenter.com/articles/41....
Thanks!
on the other hand, if i was producing this video for the Queen, and disk space wasn't an issue, i would use an intermediate format like Cineform, ProRes, or even the lagarith codec. Your instincts are correct - it's never a great idea to recompress into a format like AVCHD.
Thanks for the good word!