Encoding video for the web has been a pain in the buut for every Internet Marketer (or their editor). There is actually an art to balancing picture quality with file size. Some people even tweak these settings to get some interesting and artistic effects. Check it out:

We won't be getting the results in the video, we want a good looking picture with a small file size. Here's the settings I use to get videos that look like this:

I create .mp4 files using the H.264 format, the data rate set to 1500 kbits/sec, although I do sometimes set the data rate to 2000 (smoother looking fades, larger file size though), if it's for Youtube, I export the resolution at 1280x720. If it's for our own site, I export it at 600x360. The frame rate is 30 frames per second.

Remember to pick your own screen resolutions, we are using HD footage so that's why we export at 1280x720 or 600x360 respectively. But why 600x360? We use this resolution because our final video (the video on the site) is actually going to be smaller than that (450x253). You always want your video file to be a larger resolution than your final video (the one on the site).

With the settings mentioned above, we are getting a high def video that's 4 minutes, 41 seconds long at 72MB.

We use Mike Stewart's S3 Media Player to upload our videos and have no complaints so far. Another option is EZS3.

Feel free to ask me more questions if you have them; just leave them in the comments.

Now the bad news, do you want to know why the above information is only right half of the time? It turns out that what is going on in your video also effects how you have to encode it. If you have fast motion in your video, you may need to encode with a higher bitrate. Of course, the higher the bitrate, the higher the file size. You will have to tweak the settings a little until you find what works for you. The above settings are great for talking heads and slower movement. Those settings are also not too bad for some fast motion sections in a video. Every video is different. The more videos you make, the better they will look, the better they will be, and the easier it will be to make. So get shooting!