Video Distributions and Post Production

You've exported your video from your editing package. Good. Of course, if you've done things right you will probably have a HuffYUV file that is several gigabytes in size. You are more than likely eager to compress this to something you can use to put online or send to a convention.... but don't be hasty as there are still a lot of things you should do to prepare your footage for distribution.

In order to post-process footage, we are going to return yet again to Avisynth. This is the best post-processing tool around. What you should do is import your huffYUV avi file into an avisynth script either by using the 'Open file with Avisynth' option in VirtualDubMod or manually making a script that reads:

AVISource("yourhuffyuvexport.avi")

This should show you your video in it's full resolution glory... it looks great, but it still needs work.

The post production options you choose will depend on what type of distribution you want to encode. Most people will want to make two kinds of distribution encode - one for distribution on the internet and another for distribution to conventions.

They have similarities but there are enough differences that the guide will split into two at this point to work on both distribution types one by one.

As most of the differences will be in how you prepare your avs file, you may want to make two avs files - one for the internet distribution and another for the convention one.

Please make sure you read through every step carefully as each step is important if you want to get the right result.

Distribution Steps:


Online Video Distribution

Post Production:

Removing any Interlacing

Improving visual quality and compressibility
Aspect Ratios and Frame Sizes

Options:

Distribution Options 101

Video:

Compressing video to DivX-5 compatible XviD

alternatives:

Compressing video to MPEG-1
Compressing video to WMV9
Compressing video to RealVideo 10


Audio:

Compressing audio to MP3 (recommended)

alternatives:

Compressing audio to Mpeg1 Layer 2 for mpeg1 files.
Compressing audio to Ogg Vorbis
Compressing audio to AAC
Compressing audio to WMA

Convention Video Distribution


(coming soon)

What format does the convention want?

Post Production:

Frame Rates, Aspect Ratios and Frame Sizes

Improving visual quality and compressibility

Encoding:

Compressing video to MPEG2 with TMPGenc

alternatives:

Compressing MPEG2 with QuEnc
Compressing MPEG2 with CCE
Compressing and muxing AC3 audio


Compressing to HuffYUV AVI

Sending it in:

In the mail

over the internet via ftp