I appreciate the advice--was wondering about how to do that with Compressor and now I'm on my way. Only constructive criticism I have for you is the audio is barely audible... I had to crank my volume all the way up just to hear you!

Thank you. This was very helpful. Two questions:

1) Why did you choose to use the deinterlace filter as opposed to turning on "frame controls" and selecting deinterlace as well as making the film progressive. I thought frame controls give you more control over the quality of the type of deinterlacing you can use.

2) What is the value of selecting "square pixels" as opposed to the pixel aspect ratio of whatever the original video was that you were editing in (I use NTSC CCIR \16:9 anamorphic). Does Vimeo just convert your video into square pixels anyways after uploading? Is that why you encoded as square pixels?

Thanks again.

One final question: why did you choose to do 50 as your key frame rate instead of 25? Is there a benefit to doing a higher multiple of your frame rate (which is you case, is 25fps for PAL)?

Hi George - cheers for your questions. Here are some thoughts, but it's important that I don't try and overstate my level of experience and expertise!

1. I keep thinking "different strokes for different folks" here. However, I have been making these tutorials for students as part of a course in video post-production (actually, relating to 'documenting performance') so many of the choices I was making were about 'ease of explanation'. In this case, the latest version of compressor has a great deinterlacing filter that 'does the job' (albeit slowly). But, you are right - particularly (as I understand it) if you switching between HD and SD projects, and want to have greater control of which fields are 'pulled out' (etc). My key concerns were a) simplicity, and b) ensuring the students did not forget to deinterlace materials (particularly because, for the most part, the footage they shoot has a lot of movement).

2. I am going to contradict myself here. My goal in manually selecting sq pixels was about foregrounding different aspect ratios for different media/outputs. So, in this case, I chose the 'more complex' route as a means of ensuring they were clear about square versus rectangular pixels (not a simple matter), which is critical for those of them exporting unusual sized sequences for, say, DVD-ROM versus DVD-video (ie TV output). But, as far as I am aware, you are right regarding vimeo doing the conversion (although I've also had unwanted letterboxing in vimeo).

3. Another answer, another contradiction. I chose 50 as a compromise between file size and ensuring the 'movement' in their work is still reasonably well compressed. Again, I probably would be better to have chosen 25 (to ensure smoother compression of the frame rates), but 50 frames is a value from my 'pre-flash' days (and particularly in this case when vimeo is doing the 'hard work' with the compression from mov to fla) when chasing a compromise between file size and having reasonably good compression of footage with a lot of movement.

So - cheers George, you've called my bluff on three different parts! Again, my goal was not really to make settings that were gospel in the vimeo world (not at all), but ones that were quite specific to the things we were looking into in class.

All the best, and I hope this is useful to any ongoing dialogue for people about compression settings etc.

Simon

Thanks!

This is exactly what I was looking for. It was a great little tutorial, and it helped a lot to see how (and where) exactly to change the settings in Compressor to those which Vimeo suggests. Now I can compress all of my videos the same way using the same custom compression!

Thank you!