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This video tutorial details how to use Apple Compressor to produce H.264 video files for Flash distribution.
Here’s some background information explaining some of the encoding decisions made in the tutorial. First, the project involved a concert produced solely for streaming, so I shot in progressive mode. Hence no de-interlacing. Since music was involved, I encoded in 128 kbps stereo, where usually I produce in mono at 64 kbps or less.
I was producing for Flash distribution, so I encoded using H.264 and chose the MOV extension, which should work just fine with the Flash Player. The video will be distributed via progressive download (hence multipass, VBR encoding) solely to computers, and is not targeted at iPods or other devices. For this reason, I use H.264’s main profile, and would have used the high profile if available. Had I wanted to produce a file that would load on an iPod, as well as play on a computer, I would have used the Baseline profile. Of course, had I been producing for a streaming server, I likely would have produced in CBR mode, though that’s not essential.
If all this sound totally foreign to you, check out the streaming media primer, here, and the Producing H.264 Video for Flash: An Overview, here:
