Best file size for web video - help needed

[Sporky]

Hi,

I am a newbie with Flash and video encoding. However, I am building a website on which my client wants to promote his web videos. The current video he has given me are Quick Time movies with each approx a size of 500MB - which is obviously massiv.

If I encode those movies into an FLV file, will the size reduce or do we need to compress these movies further to make them smaller? What would be the optimum size for a movie on the web?

I tried to encode those movies using my Flash 8 Video Encoder, but received the following error message:
"The video codec used for the source file could not be read" does anyone know what this means? Is is due to an older version of Flash?

Any help or advise would be really appreciated.

Thank you!!

[Triggers12]

I'm working on a project that involves something similar, I'm not using FLVs. And I'm not sure how well this will work for you, but it might be of some help

I'm recording video clips from MS flight Sim ( I'm doing an aerodynamic quiz program ), and typically the video clips are about... 10-15 mb per second of recording, so on a 30 second clip the file gets up to about 300mb.

I use a program call "Virtual Dub" to compress the videos down to a smaller file, It doesnt really make the video look bad, but Its not in HD :P. Once I convert them to a smaller file ( I've gotten them down to about 15mb from about 200 or so depending on your compression settings, and you can mess around with it, it doesnt take long ) i import them into a new flash file and just save it as a .swf file. Which retains the size of the movie clip pretty well, just set the stage to the same size of the clip you want in the main site.

Then you can just save the .swf movies on your server. Right now i have my program set up for testing and I just have a input box that ask for the movie name and it loads it into the movie box.

just use loadMovie("target.swf, "")


A little long, but i hope it helps!