Hi there,
No problem. May I ask what you’ll be using to do your video work? I find After Effects is the best tool for the job, although the settings for compression are pretty much standard. Generally speaking whatever you’re using will have a bunch of presets, so here are a few guidelines.
For the size I would use either 1080p or 720p (i.e. 1920 x 1080 pixels or 1080 x 720 pixels). Both these are 16:9 ratio. In the Cardinal demos we’ve rolled with 1920×1080, but 1080×720 is also fine. Next, you want to be using square pixels and a frame rate of 25. Once you’re happy with your video you need the following export/compression settings:
Step 1 – export the main video file
Format: H.264
Bitrate: for 720p you want 5-10Mbps / for 1080p you want between 10-20Mbps.
If you’re using Audio: 48khz, AAC codec at 320 kbps is the one you want.
It will output as an mp4 file.
Step 2 – export the backup video file (this is because some browsers load these quicker and end up using them instead of your mp4 file.)
The format you want is either webm or ogg. We use webm, but you’ll need a third party bit of software for this. We use http://www.mirovideoconverter.com. It’s free and easy to use. I would export your original movie as a Quicktime mov (lossless for highest quality.) Then drop it into Miro and use these settings:
Format > Video > WebM HD
Then click the settings icon and make sure it hasn’t changed the size settings of your original file.
Step 3 – Export the first frame of your video as an image for the poster. You can upload this to make sure your viewers see something whilst the video is loading. If you’re using a row, choose “Add image” as if it was an image row.
General guidelines: We tend not to use video that doesn’t loop well, and we try to keep them down to around 12 seconds in length. Although it depends on the complexity and size of the video content. The last thing (promise!) you want to consider is hosting. We’ve found a huge difference in the speed of serving videos between different hosting companies, which resulted in us using Amazon S3 specifically for that.
If you have any further questions, just let me know.
Cheers
Kristian
.