Video on the Web, part deux

Here is my goal:  start with video produced by my camcorder in MPEG4/H.264 format, add a title page with a couple of transitions, export it to SWF format for easy viewing on the web (hopefully with a progressive download).  This goal should be accomplished for a moderate investment which I arbitrarily define as under $300.

I already have Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0, so that was my first trial.  It is very easy to add titles and transitions to my video but the export options are limited.  Most exports are to lower resolution formats and I want to retain the original 640 X 480 format.  I am able to export to Flash FLV format at the correct resolution though rendering was fairly slow.  I looked long and hard for a utility to convert the FLV to the more usable SWF format.  I settled on FLV & SWF Toolbox from Eltima Software and purchased this program, albeit prematurely.  Though FLV & SWF Toolbox creates a nice SWF file, it cannot be progressively downloaded; the viewer must wait for the entire file to be downloaded before the video is displayed in the browser.  It was not a particularly noticable problem with my short test videos but when I converted my three minute video (with sound) of the White Water Safari, the delay was significant, even with my 10 Mbps download speed.  Another problem with FLV & SWF Toolbox is that it always sets the SWF file to repeat.  When I inquired if there is a way to disable repeat, I was told that it would be an option in a future version.  So I am the not so proud owner of (yet another) piece of software that really won't be useful to me.

I also tried using Adobe Flash 8.0 to convert the FLV to SWF.  I had very mixed results with this approach and eventually abandoned Flash 8 as a tool for this project.  It would be nice it Adobe Premiere and Adobe Flash worked better together, but I know they come from different parts of Adobe and it is obvious - maybe some time in the future.

Magix MovieEdit Pro 12 was my next try.  I downloaded MovieEdit Pro because their feature list mentioned output to Flash format (don't know if that is FLV or SWF).  Installed and fired it up.  It cannot read .MP4 (H.264) - therefore useless for me.  Uninstalled - very quick evaluation!

Ulead VideoStudio 11 was next on my list.  Another download and install.  The user interface is a little unusual but I could get used to it.  Imported my MPEG4 with no problem.  Easily added a title.  Lots of output options; I chose MPEG4 for iPod 640X480 which is essentially the same as my original video clip except for the addition of a title and compression.  It worked okay, so I then converted the output to SWF using Sothink Video Encoder for Adobe Flash.  The original clip was about a minute long and 25 MB in size.  The resulting MP4 file was only 17 MB in size so some compression has occurred.

Success!  The MP4 ouput from Ulead Video Studio was fed to Sothink Video Encoder and resulted in a 12 MB SWF file and a small HTML file for setup.  I uploaded these to the server and the playback works just as I wanted.  Playback is immediate, size is 640 by 480, there is a nice control bar at the bottom of the video.  The VideoStudio rendering was much quicker than Premiere Elements though it is not an exact comparison.

Mission Accomplished.  Sothink Video Encoder for Flash was $45 and Ulead VideoStudio 11 was $99.99, so I came in well under my budget for this project.  Here is the White Water Safari video resulting from this combo.  This video sometimes stalls at the very beginning - clicking the link again usually gets it going.  I think I know what might be wrong so I will fiddle with it a bit to make it more reliable.