Video Standards

Master Footage:

For your master video footage, do your video editing work to fit within the standard 720x480 format. Even if you edit for wide screen formats, make the maximum width 720. This way, down the road, should you or RaintreeTV decide to distribute DVD's containing samples of people's work, everyone's video can easily be combined (letterboxed to fit within standard 720x480) and transferred onto DVD. If you use a format wider than 720, when your work is letterboxed this will require shrinking your video and reducing the director's original intent as well as video quality. RaintreeTV will not sell your video without your explicit paper written agreement, see Terms of Contribution (TOC).

You may keep your master video footage "interlaced." Should your work ever be put on DVD, most people here in the United States view video with players and televisions as Interlaced NTSC.

Internet Version of your Master Footage:

Once you have completed your video in a standard format, compress and export your video for display on the web. Even for short videos, the maximum screen size should be 360 x 240 (1/4th of full screen).

However the preferred size is 180 x 120 (1/8th of full screen). This will allow viewers to zoom in by a factor of 2 to 360x240 without severely impacting quality. This 360x240 size will approximately consume 1/4th of the common computer screen and web page view.

The video should be compressed and exported into a "progressive download" format which will allow people to begin viewing your video before the entire file has downloaded, making viewing as fast as possible. This will also allow for the appearance of pseudo-streaming without the additional cost of maintaining a streaming server, which can get expensive.

"Progressive scan" is not the same thing as "progressive download!" For your master video footage use the interlaced option, but for the web optimized version, you can use progressive scan.

There are two major concerns: file size and data rate.

file size:

The bigger the file size, the fewer videos can be made available on RaintreeTV at the same time for people to see. This will probably mean, of those we choose to display, we'll display some for short periods of time and change the list of videos available for over time to display all the videos we choose to display. Please keep the file size to an absolute minimum.

You may also think of taking your "director's cut" and creating a "short version" for the web, perhaps even a promo or advertisement to sell your work. If you can get enough people interested, perhaps they'll buy a copy or pay an extra membership fee to be able to download your entire "director's cut." The extra revenue will be solely for covering the extra cost of RaintreeTV storing the large video files on a web server.

data rate:

For web versions of progressive download video, the data rate you should plan on for DSL/cable internet access viewers shouldn't exceed 128 kilobytes per second which is 1024 kilo "bits" per second AKA 1024 kbps. Consider this the absolute max. You may find that the video quality is perfectly adequate at lower rates. A more typical rate for DSL/broadband video is 768 Kbits/s which tranlsates into downloading a file at 96 Kbytes/s. At this rate it will not allow typical dial up users to view the video until they have downloaded the entire file, if even possible, but will allow broadband users to watch as the video downloads. If you want to prepare 2 web versions of the video for visitors using DSL/cable and dial up modem, I wouldn't exceed 400 kbits/s, which translates into downloading a file at about 50 Kbytes/s.

You may even consider compressing different parts of your video differently to maximize quality where important and minimize quality for scenes which are not essential. For example, you could have a short series of chapters, each of which could be downloaded seperately. Experiment!