HD shooting and compressing

[Anonymous]

I recently ran into an issue with shooting and HD video. I used soft lightingfor the talking head,and compressed it as and .movfile. When the video was distributed to be compressedas and .flvthe editorwas having issues with the video. He mentioned that the reason for the bad compression wasbecause I had soft lighting throught the video. Is that true? If so, what are some tips for lightingtalent for web? Thanks

[Anonymous]

Hmmm…… I’m a bit skeptical of that explanation. True, soft lighting creates gradations of light on your subject, increasing the number of color shades to be rendered. But the typical scene has so much going on in it, that it seems to me that the extra shades created by soft lighting woud be a drop in the bucket compared to the already existing complexity of the scene. On the other hand, the method of compression could be the culprit. Could you give your editor an uncompressed file from your original footage, and let him experiment with that?

Ken

[Anonymous]

Will do, thanks for the quick response!

[Rob]

it’s not the lighting that’s the problem. it’s the compression technique.

tell your editor:

In the compressing options there should be a parameter to set keyframes. For a talking head, you can get away with keyframes every 30 frames. If your video contains fast motion, you may want a keyframe every 5-15 frames depending on how fast the motion is. Slower motion in the video means keyframes can be further apart, which is why you can get away with a keyframe every 30 frames with talking heads.

[Anonymous]

Thanks, in order to be streamed through the web he can’t go larger than 500 bit rate. I’m sure adding key frames will minimize file size and will also help compression.

[Author]

Posts