Video Editing Production | Video Production Guide Hosts Test

I edited some Video Production Guide clips together and uploaded the video to TubeMogul in order to compare the quality of the results at different host sites.

In this test case I used Sony Vegas Pro 8 as the editor software. The reason I used this over MS MovieMaker was that I wanted to create an MP4 video file, which MovieMaker cannot do directly and which would require a separate conversion. This is no big deal but it does take time.

I took slides created in MS PowerPoint that were saved as TIF files and imported them into Vegas. Before doing the import step, I decided on 3 seconds as the viewing duration and set that in the editor options. The duration can be modified in the timeline but each slide has to be touched.

At a few points I added a transition cross fade, and a fade out at the end. I also placed an overlay text watermark at various periods.

Then I added an audio track of music, with a fade down at the end. The end result is a video of about 2 minutes 30 seconds.

Here is an image of the editor timeline.

To end up with a High Definition video you need to render the edited content at a high bitrate. To keep the final file under 100MB for TubeMogul this two and a half minute runtime could be rendered at up to about 5.3Mbps bitrate. A bitrate of 2Mbps should be adequate for high quality and still have a manageable file size. Another way of saying this is rendering 2.5 minutes at 2Mbps will result in about a 37.5MB file.

The short calculation is MB = 7.5 x T x BR where MB is megabytes, T is minutes of video and BR is megabits per second.

In the Vegas Pro 8 ‘render as’ dialog I chose MP4 file type, custom template, chose a frame size of 1280 by 720 for wide screen, frame rate of 29.97, and constant bitrate of 2,000,000, and checked the box to stretch video to fill the output frame size. This latter option is not ideal as it distorts the image but I wanted the 4 to 3 ratio of the slides to fill a 16 to 9 widescreen to test letterboxing and windowing. If your original source content is widescreen this is obviously not necessary.

Then I uploaded the video file to TubeMogul and checked off the shared hosts Yahoo, Metacafe, Google, DailyMotion, BlipTV, and Veoh. I used the default embed code from each site, except in the case of BlipTV I halved the display size from 1280×750. Here’s how they display on each host:

Video Production Guide @ MetaCafe

Video Production Guide @ Google Video

Video Production Guide @ blip.tv

Watch Video Production Guide in How to Videos | View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

Thanks to Paul at Cybercam.com DSLR Video and Photography for his comparison and inspiration.

By using the host sites’ embed code you can see how different the results are for Video Production Guide in quality and theme or skin style.