Overview

Status: Available | Released: Feb 5th, 2009

This tutorial is available!

Filmed in both Mac OS and Windows Vista, this tutorial shows the correct way to encode video for use in Flash, Dreamweaver, or any other Adobe CS4 application.

Everybody is using Flash video these days, and YouTube is perhaps the best example of what's possible using this video format. But have you ever noticed how bad YouTube videos typically look? Well there's no reason for that to happen. If you want to make your YouTube videos look great, you need to watch this tutorial!

This tutorial is produced by Robert Reinhardt, an industry-recognized expert on Flash video production and thee world's most prolific technical author on this subject. In close to 3 hours of video compression tutorials Robert shows you deep secrets of encoding, along with serious time-tested tips that will make your videos shine.

This tutorial is much more than just a detailed overview of video encoding principles. You'll begin by learning what tools are available for video compression, how to optimize your source video by removing noise, artifacts, and interlacing (using After Effects), and important techniques for restoring video to create the best source for encoding.

Once your video is polished and ready for compression, you'll discover deep secrets about how codecs work while exploring bit rates, key frames, audio compression, and all the other intricate settings that are part of compressing video that looks amazing. While most of the work is done in Adobe Media Encoder, you'll also learn about 3rd party encoding tools so you can make an educated decision on which video compression utility is right for you!

This is a comprehensive tutorial, but you don't need to watch the entire show. Use the detailed menu system and keyword search features to quickly find topics of interest. For a full list of this tutorial's topics, see the Table of Contents.

Outline

Section 1: Working with QuickTime

Section 2: Other Video Tools

Section 3: Encoding Terminology

Section 4: Understanding Video

Section 5: Restoring Video with Adobe After Effects

Section 6: Deinterlacing Video

Section 7: Working with Codecs

Section 8: Encoding Video with Adobe Media Encoder

Section 9: Encoding Video with Telestream Episode Pro

Section 10: Encoding a Music Video

Section 11: Working with Alpha Channels

Section 12: Encoding for YouTube

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Reviews

Rich Leach wrote on February 11, 2009

There is no way that Adobe should ship a single license of Flash or After Effects without your Flash CS4 105 lessons. I literally struggled all weekend (at least 20 hours) to get some crappy test footage into a usable format to upload and test in the Flash player and YouTube, and at best it looked mediocre and I still never got it right on YouTube. Your video answered every question I had after playing with Adobe's online help, Lynda.com lessons (which were but not nearly as precise as your videos were, you simply have to know what those encoding menu details mean (VBR, CBR, how to set them, etc.)) and even the Adobe Classroom in a Book (which is only good if you're going to play exclusively with their included files, really the Classroom in a Book Series is more for someone completely new to the Adobe CS4 software, very poor for reference. I simply marked your movie numbers in a list so that when I next have to encode my movie for Youtube I know to simply watch #108 again. I really believe I had gotten as far as I could without talking to someone who knew the rest of the way. Your video did exactly that and filled in every blank. Feel free to pass on my comments to your readers, and let them know that learning about video production and editing with the CS4 suite will almost have to happen from multiple sources, but they'll be lost if they don't get your movie. Thank you.
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Graham Cownie wrote on February 9, 2009

I bought and studied this tutorial one Sunday afternoon when I was absolutely desperate for a solution to my excessively large video files. From Reinhardt's very through approach, it quickly became apparent that Adobe Media Encoder is not something you can just muck about with until you get it right. You need to understand the basics and Reinhardt does an excellent job of explaining them. For me the end result was being able to compress my videos to less than 10% of the size I'd achieved by unstructured trial and error. I have only one small criticism: the lack of some indication of the importance of each of the pre-processing tasks for a satisfactory end result. For example Reinhardt goes into some detail about how to reduce noise using Adobe After Effects (a hellishly expensive package) but he doesn't tell you whether this is a crucial step resulting in megabytes off your final file size or just a nice refinement which loses you a few kilobytes. However this is a very small criticism of an othwerwise spectacularly useful package. If you are new to video encoding you NEED to take this tutorial.
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