vidoman wrote:There's more than those if you go the route of Share>Create Video File>Custom. You can select FLV from the drop-down in the Save as Type dialog window. Then press the Options button, go to the General tab, and for Frame Size you have from 40x30 up to 800x600.
Silly me! I missed that!
There are indeed more frame size options when you select FLV from Custom, and perhaps more significantly, there are three different levels of compression to choose from, and the data rate can also be varied.
If it is the encoding to Flash that is causing a drop-off in picture quality, there's definitely room for some experimentation there with all the settings.
I should perhaps have mentioned that the whole FLV thing doesn't make a difference. The quality you see on the finished Flash player version is the same (visually) as the rendered video file from VS. Once the video is rendered (AVI format) I then use another programme called Allok Video to FLV Converter to produce the final Flash file.
So the actual flash footage is the same to look at (ie poor quality DV) as the rendered video version from VS.
I'm puzzled !!
I do agree with BlackLab re the lighting - that is definitely still an issue, it's just the poor quality footage from the camera I'm seeing as the puzzling bit. But as Ken said, it may be a camera fault.
When doing Chroma-key productions, and you have problems with halos or not being able to completely remove parts, or parts are being removed that you don't want removed, you need to create and use garbage mattes. These are used to get rid of this stuff "garbage" you don't want in your final video.
Now the problem here is that VS not having motion paths, it would be very difficult to use a garbage matte to effectively remove any halo around you. Higher end NLEs like MSP8 was able to use these very well.
As far as the quality of a FLV video, it depends on the encoder being used, and of course the quality of the source. I've not used Allok, but a couple of others, and find that with motion video, they just don't do that well. They're not bad for still images, ie; slide-shows. YouTube is getting better, however as far as I'm concerned still is poor at best. Most of the video clips you see on YouTube that are crisp, started out has high-quality, Hi-Def, not SD created by a cheap camcorder. They can stand to lose quality, and yet appear very good quality.
By poor DV quality are you meaning the problems with your green-screening? If so, it's just a matter of getting your lighting down, and then being able to chroma-key it. VS is not the best at chroma-key.
Vidoman, thanks for that. I've PM'd you the URL for the clip so you can see the same as the others. Maybe it would shed some light on the situation if you could see the problem as it's happening?
As I mentioned earlier, the screen was well lit in terms of having a solid green (see pic at the top of the thread) - I was stood about 5 ft in front of the screen with the camera a further 5 or 6 ft ahead of me.
