In preparation for the trailer competition, I wanted to see how footage from the movie would hold up when subjected to the Flash compression of YouTube and the other video-sharing sites. So I uploaded three clips in various formats to experiment.
The results? Two clips look surprisingly great. The third looks like ass.
The difference isn’t in the format, or the file size, but the background. The ass-y clip has a forest of sun-dappled leaves in the background, and the compression algorithms freak out trying to handle the level of detail. That’s not unique to Flash; sun-dappling is pretty much the bete noir of video. Several resources recommended applying a soften filter to tamp down the background noise. While it reduced the overall file size, it didn’t end up helping the video quality much.
In the end, the h.264 format ended up working out best for me, but as always, YMMV.1
The clips are from the DVD that goes out to television stations, for use in reviews and news stories. They show the three different looks in the movie.
- Conveniently, the iPhone and AppleTV both use this format, which makes it easy to carry clips (and trailers) with me. ↩