By: Kary | In: video, Podcasting |
I’ve noticed that a few of the podcasting grant winners are creating video podcasts. For most, when they are played, the video plays very slowly in the web browser. I have run some tests and the problem is usually because the file size is so large it takes awhile for it to load into the computer’s cache. The end result is a slow moving, jerky movie with many starts and stops.There are a few things you can do to avoid this.
- Create a smaller movie (duh). But really. I know none of us are Steven Spielberg (did I spell that correctly?) But even he has to take hours and hours of film and edit it down to 2 hours or less. Sometimes editing the movie to its most essential message will not only make the movie load faster, and play more smoothly…but it usually makes the end result more interesting.
- Be careful how you publish the movie. M4V isn’t necessarily the best format. It may look the best….but remember, with “looking the best” comes a trade off. It means the file size of the movie is MUCH MUCH larger. All that details adds up to more megabytes in file size. And the more megabytes you have, the slower the movie will “cache”. You need to remember your audience and where you are viewing your movie. Web delivery means you can’t always choose the publish options that will make the best looking movie possible with as much detail as possible. In fact…you should look at quite the opposite when it comes time to publishing your movie for the web. You should look at it from the perspective of - what’s the smallest file size I can get away with and still have a good looking movie.
Take a look at some tests I ran that demonstrates what I am referring to here - http://sbisd-edtech.com/blog/2008/02/01/the-test-and-results/.
