egafd.com

Regarding HD, its always better to record in this, even if outputing to SD. HD downsized to SD, should always looks better than SD outputted as SD.

Sorry to go off-topic, I dont really think broadband speeds in the UK are that bad, on average they are better than the US.

In the last 12 months, i can't think of any member sites ive used that can saturate my NTL 20mbit line, with most downloading around 750KB/sec (6Mbit) and some smaller sites downloading as little as 100KB/sec (approx 1Mbit).....almost always due to the host being in USA.

Of course you also don't need to use massive files for HD on the web, ive seen a lot of websites use very high bitrates for there movies, when they could have got a way with a lot lower (and lower filesize) and almost no quality difference. I would love to do a HD comparison and post the results here with a clip at different bitrates if anybody is interested, i would need a sample (maybe a minute's worth) of footage that has not already been processed.

I gather from what you have said in previous posts, Twingo, that you are a comms engineer. I'd be interested in your opinion on a maximum acceptable bit rate for HD downloads bearing in mind the wide variation in download speeds now available.

Haha no, im not a comms engineer.

Regarding bitrate, it should be high enough so that quality is not affected, but not to high that the extra bitrate has almost no effect, other than to increase the filesize, which from a producer's point of view affects your overall bandwidth and storage on your hosting and from the consumer, really just download time. Important things to consider are the encoder you're using and de-interlace filters, which can make a bigger difference than just altering bandwidth.

If your worried about download speeds to the customer, then normally you can make the biggest difference by choosing a host which resides in the same country as your majority audience. I joined a relatively new UK site, last month and download speeds were approx 70KB/sec due to their choice of hosting. So download HD clips from this site would have been painfull, regardless of any decent bandwidth they chose.

Anybody who is encoding and not sure what bitrate they should choose, could encode the same clip with multiple bitrates and make a comparison themselves. I'd be happy to do this for a 1 minute clip, if anybody wants to send me some raw footage.

Hi All
Thanks for all the feed back it be very helpful!:-)

Hi Brian.

If your editing equipment allows for it (usually a dual core processor and plenty of RAM at the very least), always go for HD rather DV as it gives you more scope with your editing.

When given HD footage, I always do a HD master edit for clients, as well as a downscaled DV-AVI version (which could also be exported to tape if you prefer to archive this way) and also various web formats.

Just remember to invest in an external/internal harddrive to store your HD files (if the HD Cam is not tape based) and good editing software too like Sony Vegas.

RW

http://www.reelworlds.com