Hands-On Guide to Flash Video

CHAPTER 7

Preparing for Compression

You’ve created the set, shot the video and now you’re ready to encode. But first you have the thankless task of choosing the output parameters for your Flash video, like resolution, frame rate and data rate. I say thankless because it’s the type of decision that someone will always disagree with.

For example, if your video is huge and visually perfect, your finance types will complain that you’re spending too much on bandwidth. If you lower the bit rate, viewers will either complain that the image is too small (though visually perfect) or visually degraded (though very large). Oh, well, it’s lonely at the top and all that. There obviously is no right answer but I will try to identify factors to consider before ...