How to encode videos - looking for advice

Hi there,

I am trying to produce machinima showing cool sims and producing tutorials. But I found that my mov-files are not only very large but also takes forever to load in SL. They often stop after a few seconds and start over (which is the default behaviour in SL when a video stream is not loaded fast enough). I found that other videos like the life-4U episoses, always load fast enough even if they also have large mov-files.

I wonder what is the best encoding here. I have Magix Video Deluxe 2006 on Windows XP and I also can use iMovie on my Mac mini. But there are so many options that I can choose that I'm kind of lost here. Can anybody help me with this?

It would be okay if I need to buy another encoding tool/software but I don't want to spend thousands of dollars on video editing software. But it's okay to spend $100 for a tool that can improve my videos if something like that is available.

Thanks

Jim

You don't really need to. The *best* compression method I have found is just using Quicktime Pro and encoding as a h.264 mp4. You don't need full dimensions for anything being strictly streamed inworld, aka a video at 1024x768 looks just about as good as 340x256 when being streamed inworld.

If you have want for people to see it inworld and via the web, you might consider a higher version for the web and the lower version for SL.

Thanks for the advice. I usually use 320x240 for the SL-Videos but always used quicktime instead of mp4 as export. I now found (after you post) that mp4 also works fine. But I found that h.264 has a lower quality than using the "MPEG-4 improved" setting.

Thanks a lot

Jim

There are many factors to producing sharp, clear and smooth running movies for SL. Applying an aggressive codex is one way (although you can expect pixelation and fuzzy results), framerate, resolution, colour depth, good streaming servers that can support a lot of simultanous viewers all combined will make for a good experience.