348 Chapter 20 – Video on the WebBasic Digital Video Concepts
Web Design in a Nutshell, eMatter Editioncreating video effects and compositing (think animated Photoshop). Premiere is an
extremely powerful video-editing tool that can also can create many special
effects. Premiere also has strong sound capabilities.
The following packages are also noteworthy. The U.S. dollar amounts given reflect
those at the time of this writing and are subject to change. In most cases, they
should be used as guidelines only.
QuickTime 3.0 (Mac and PC)
The first essential A/V tool for all web designers or multimedia producers on
both Mac and PC is QuickTime 3.0. This is the first release of QuickTime to
be fully functional on Windows. QT 3.0 comes with the tools need to create
streaming video and audio for the web. QuickTime supports dozens of file
formats and there are a number of new codecs that come with QT that are
ideal for the Internet (see Sorenson, next). Best of all, QuickTime 3.0 is free
from Apple. (http://www.apple.com/QuickTime). A pro version of QuickTime
can be licensed for $29.95.
Sorenson (Mac and PC)
A compression technology called Sorenson from Sorenson Vision, Inc. (http://
http://www.s-vision.com/) is fast becoming the standard on the Web. Sorenson was
originally created for medical imaging and delivers much higher quality
images than Cinepak or Indeo at the equivalent file sizes. The basic Sorenson
codec comes free with QuickTime 3.0, but a pro package is available for
$499.
Media Cleaner Pro (Mac and PC)
One last package useful for optimizing sound and video files for the web is
Media Cleaner Pro from Terran Interactive (http://www.terran.com/). This
program is designed to get the best quality files at the smallest size in what-
ever format you choose. MediaCleaner works all of the QuickTime
compressors as well as RealAudio and RealVideo. Media Cleaner also does
batch compressing. The program sells for $359 and is available bundled with
the Qcomp and Sorenson pro packages.Basic Digital Video Concepts
The following is a list of aspects of digital video that can be manipulated with
standard video-editing software. It is important to be familiar with these terms so
you can create video optimized for web delivery.
Movie Length
It’s a simple principle—limiting the length of your video clip will limit its file
size. Videos longer than a minute or two may create prohibitive download
times. If you must serve longer videos, consider one of the streaming video
solutions.
Frame Size
Obviously, the size of the frame will have an impact on the size of the file.
“Full-screen” video is 640×480 pixels. The amount of data required to deliver
that size image would be prohibitive for most web applications. The most
common frame size for web video is 160×120 pixels. Some producers will go