Delivering Video via HTML5 and Flash to reach all platforms with one video codec – how to make it work today #mlearncon

Within our workflow we divide video and audio into 4 main steps.

It all starts with capturing the content. Whether you are working with a internal group, your own team or a 3rd party it is always important to get the final assets on a hard drive at the highest quality possible. This will allow you to full control over compression and add the bonus of allowing you to recompress in the future when new technologies or codecs are introduced or optimized. Hard drives continue to drop in price, you can now get 3 terabytes for less than $150. Based on the quality size and compression you are using you can store 2-10 hours of content on the drive.

Here’s where the fun starts, it’s gotten easier and easier to compress content with the latest tools whether free or full-featured tools allow you to easily drag and drop a setting, click compress and squeeze your content to the optimal size.

First, when you are shooting your video, there are several formats and sizes that you can shoot at today. Most video cameras are shooting at HD which offers a 1920 x 1080 pixel size. This is a high-res format and you can notice every little detail of your content. Typically we shoot and capture at this quality and then size down the assets to make it easier to work with in editing.

What’s nice is that you can HD or SD quality from most digital cameras as well as smartphones today, so the content you are capturing looks amazing.

Next step is to select a size for compression. The following graphic shows some typical guidelines and sizes that we start with. Today, whether you use Flash, HTML5 or other format you can basically deliver in any size and format. So your video can be delivered 16×9, 4×3 or any other aspect ratio you can think of which gives you a lot of creative license.

Here’s one of my favorite deliverables, where you deliver video as a additional learning object to enhance the main content which in this sample is text based.

When capturing your video, it is typically shot at 29.97 frames per second (FPS). When you go to compression, we typically compress the frame rate to 10-15 fps. This allows for a much smaller file size and easier to deliver to your audience.

You also want to determine your key frames. Key frames are used when scrubbing  your video forward or back ward using the shuttle play bar. If you don’t have enough, you’ll notice inconsistent behavior and skipping while you move the shuttle bar. We use 4 times the frame rate to define the number of key frames. So if our frame rate is 15, our key frames would be 90 (4 x 15).

The other variable we want to focus on is the data rate of your video. We typically target 800 – 1200 kilobits per second. If you have good quality video this will give you great compression without noticeable loss in your video content.

We also get a bonus by using newer codecs, such as H264. They allow for a technique called pixel doubling, so if you compress your video to a size of 320×240, you can stretch or size the video 2x, in this example 640×480. This allows for smaller sizes but offering a larger format for delivery.

If your video is coming from a analog format, don’t forget to deinterlace your content to remove the banding effect.

The other important compression ingredient most of us forget, is compressing our audio. For audio you want to make sure you :

This will give you a much smaller size and still have great quality content.