How to Achieve Higher Video Quality

The following guidelines will help you achieve better quality in your video encodings:

• Increasing video and audio Bitrate (field Bitrate in the Video and Audio tabs) naturally increases quality.
• Lower the video frame size and/or the frame rate (respectively slider Frame Size and Frame Rate in the Video tab) which will lower the amount of actual data compressed, allowing better quality for the same bitrate. In most cases source video quality might be to much for web Flash video: for example lowering the frame rate from 30 FPS to 20 or the frame image to 75% original size will produce better video quality at the same bitrate without significant quality loss.
• Using VBR 2-pass encoding will usually produce better results (field Video Encoding in the Video tab). Or if bandwidth is not an issue, encoding at Constant Quality with higher quality settings will produce perfect results (field Video Encoding in the Video tab).
• The period for Intra frames (complete frames) might be too small, wasting bandwidth. The Flash player can only seek to intra frames, so care should be taken in selecting this period (field Keyframe in the Video tab).
• If the video appears blurry, try to uncheck the Smoothing checkbox and change Motion Detection to Fast.

The final quality also depends in the characteristics of the source video: material with fast movement will always be more complicated to encode (e.g. produce lower quality for a given bitrate) than talking head-style videos. In practice the best way should be to start with the High Quality Settings and change the above mentioned settings to more appropriate values.