Step 4. Adjusting Quality and Compression Settings

In this section you can set the publish quality settings.

Video Format

There are three video format you can choose:

Flash 8 video deliver the best quality video with a small file size. However you need to download and install a free plugin before you can use this feature. Please go here to know more.

Zip/Screen video is usefull to encode an uncompressed video containing a desktop recording. The resulting video is compressed without any loss of quality but in return the file size may be a quite large.

Sorenson video has been superceeded by Flash 8 video. This format is equivalent to Flash MX video.

Flash Video Studio offers you three different ways of adjusting quality settings based on your primary goal.

This is suitable if you already have the maximum internet speed/bandwidth target that your want to achieve. Automatic adjustment can only be used for Flash 8 and Sorenson video format.

This is suitable if you want to control the video and audio quality separately by selecting the preset setting (Poor, Fair, Average, Good, Best) for each quality.

This is suitable if you want to have a total control of compression settings.

Note: Better quality settings means bigger bandwidth and file size.

At any time, Flash Video Studio shows you the estimated published video bandwidth and file size at the bottom right corner of the main window.

1. Automatic adjustment

For automatic adjustment, click the Select Preset Quality and choose any of the following options:

This feature can only be used for Flash 8 and Sorenson video format.

When you select a preset quality, you will see that all compression settings such as quantizer/bitrate, key frame, audio frequency and channels are automatically calculated based on your video specification.

Flash Video Studio will notify you, if it predicts that the published video using a selected preset quality will produce a bigger bandwidth/bad quality. In this case what you need to do is either choosing a bigger preset quality bandwidth or resizing the video to a smaller size and reducing the video frame rate (we will discuss both options later in this page). However, it is impossible to predict the published file size and bandwidth accurately, so sometimes you might want to do a test publish to see it.

2. Semi-automatic adjustment

To do semi-automatic adjustment, select the Quality listbox inside the Video and Audio Control Group. There are 5 different presets (Poor, Fair, Average, Good and Best). Selecting a preset will automatically fill in the manual settings such as quantizer/bitrate/color depth, key frame, audio frequency and channels.

With semi-automatic adjustment. it is very handy to set a quality for video and audio separately (eg: you want the best audio quality but only an average video quality).

3. Manual adjustment

To do a manual adjustment, you must set the Quality listbox for Video or Audio to the Custom settings. Then the quantizer/bitrate/color depth, key frame, audio frequency and channels controls will be enabled.

Quantizer

Quantizer sets how much visual compression that you want to apply to your video. The smaller the quantizer value the better the quality but the bigger the file size and bandwidth. Bigger quantizer value will produce blur and blocky image (just like what you found in JPEG files with lower quality settings).

This feature is only available when you select a Sorenson video format.

Bitrate

Bitrate sets how much bandwidth your video will be encoded at. Bandwidth unit is kbps (kilo bit per second). 8 kilobit equivalent to 1 kilobytes. The bigger the bitrate value the better the quality but the bigger the file size. Smaller bitrate value will produce blur and blocky image (just like what you found in JPEG files with lower quality settings).

This feature is only available when you select a Flash 8 video format.

Block Width/Height

Block width/height sets how big a video screen block is. A screen video compression divides a video frames into smaller blocks and compress each of them as a GIF image. A smaller block value may be better for a video which has lots of small moving objects while a bigger block value may be better for a video which has one or two big moving objects.

This feature is only available when you select a Zip/screen video format.

Color depth

Color depth sets how much visual compression that you want to apply to your video by using a color reduction algorithm to preserve the important sharp edges. The bigger the color depth value the better the quality but the bigger the file size and bandwidth.

This feature is only available when you select a Zip/screen video format.

Key Frame

Macromedia Flash video format adopts a MPEG2 compression method which stores a very good quality image at a specific interval and only store low quality image within the interval. The shorter the interval, the better the image quality but produces slightly bigger file size.

Audio Frequency

Audio frequency sets how much you want to compress your audio. Flash Video Studio supports 3 different frequency settings that are supported by Macromedia Flash.

The bigger the audio frequency, the better the audio quality but produces bigger file size.

Audio Channels

Flash Video Studio supports mono/stereo channels. Stereo channel produces a slightly bigger file size but better audio quality.

Note: To make sure the smallest file size achieved, Flash Video Studio will never produce an audio frequency and channels bigger than the original video input.

Fade audio at end

To enable/disable fade out the audio at the end of the movie

Next - Step 5. Publishing the Video

What else can you do here?

Changing a publish dimension

You can set a different publish dimension from your original video. Check the Change dimension to checkbox and type in the width and height value. When the keep aspect ratio checkbox is checked, the height is automatically calculated from the typed width.

Changing a frame rate

You can set a different publish frame rate from your original video. Check the Change frame rate to checkbox and type in the frame rate value.

Changing a video resolution

You can reduce the video resolution to obtain smaller published size. When you reduce your video resolution, text and image watermark will also suffer the resolution reduction as they are drawn on top of the video image. Reducing a video resolution 2x smaller than original will causes each video pixel to be drawn twice larger. Thus it is recommended to turn on Smooth Video at Settings tab when you reduce the video resolution to avoid pixelation effects.

Important

Changing a publish dimension and a frame rate can reduce the published file size and bandwidth significantly. As a rule of thumb, reducing the publish dimension by half (eg: from 720x480 to 360x240) reduces the file size and bandwidth by almost three times smaller. Reducing the frame rate by half (eg: from 30fps to 15fps) reduces the file size and bandwidth by almost two times smaller.

Setting deblocking and smoothing

Macromedia Flash video format allows deblocking and smoothing to be specified to improve the video quality during the playback. Turning these settings on/off will not increase/decrease the publish size and bandwidth. They are only being used when the movie is playing. The Macromedia Flash video format splits a video image into several rectangular sections, when the deblocking checkbox is checked, the boundary between adjacent rectangles will be smoothen out producing a better visual quality but the video might play a bit slower on a slow computer.

When the smoothing checkbox is checked, the entire video will be smoothen out when playing. This also increases the visual quality but the video might also play a bit slower on a slow computer.