2004General Discussion forum
Video format and file size considerations for posting demo reels online in 2004
22 years old. Gear and prices may have changed since.
What the thread found
- Windows Media Video and QuickTime were the preferred formats for online demo reels, with Windows Media offering better size-to-quality ratio and QuickTime providing broader compatibility across platforms.
- Multiple bitrate encoding in a single Windows Media file allowed serving the same video to different connection speeds from 56k to 1mbps.
- QuickTime in MP4 format required at least version 6 for playback and resulted in approximately 3.5 megabytes per minute at reasonable frame sizes.
- Sorenson 3 codec provided better visual quality than MPEG4 for QuickTime streaming despite being an older codec.
- Breaking demo reels into clips of 30 seconds to 2 minutes with preview information helped viewers choose which segments to download and manage expectations about download time.
- Windows Movie Maker was noted as producing surprisingly good compression results.
- Mac users often could not view Windows Media Video files, making QuickTime necessary for cross-platform compatibility.
Depends on
- The discussion occurred in 2004 when internet connection speeds were significantly slower than modern standards.
- QuickTime MP4 compatibility was limited to version 6 and later.
- Streaming video hosting was expensive at the time, limiting options for many creators.
- No consensus was reached on optimal file sizes or download wait times.
- The compression quality comparison between codecs was anecdotal rather than technical analysis.