Video format and load times

[whitlowe]

I have a series of video clips that are running in a presentation. There are about 10 clips of only two minutes each. I am struggling to find the best video format for them because I would like for them to play on an iPad as well and have a decent load time in the presentation. When selecting formats fv4 is about 40MB for a 2 minute clip, flv is about 9MB and mp4 is about 80MB. Here are my questions?

1. Some of these file types seem very large for only a two minute clip. I am producing them out of Adobe Premier Elements and can't seem to get them smaller. Formerly I had used Camtasia to shrink some of these clips and they ended up around 5 MB for the same length of file. Is there a recommended file type that would be best and also be able to play on an iPad? I had heard mp4 was better for this option, but I can't seem to get the mp4 file sized down to something reasonable.

2. I want to minimize the load time for this presentation. The title will be playing in Moodle (LMS) and I'm wondering if it is faster to put the videos in the Lectora title, or simply load them into the Moodle file structure and link to them from within the Lectora title, so the user does not have to wait for all of the videos to load before seeing certain pages. Which of these options would be better?

Thanks very much,
Whitney

[sconnell]

1. H.264 video CODEC is playable on an iDevice, however, I can't guarantee that the Lectora player control is compatible. Video compression can be excellent in H.264. There are a number of tools available (sorry, I can elaborate tomorrow if necessary) but the only video tool that comes to mind, at the moment, is TechSmith's Camtasia v6 or better.

2. I'm not certain it would make any difference.

[whitlowe]

Thanks very much for your help on this. I got some additional information out of the Moodle forums (our LMS) that helped with the video compression issues. I seem to be getting the best compromise between video quality and file size by exporting them out of Adobe Premiere as QuickTime files and then using Handbrake to encode them as H.264 mp4 files. Handbrake seems to be a great option for video encoding if you have never used it. (HandBrake)

[MD]

Whitney,

As a video compression tool, I'd suggest taking a look at Sorenson Squeeze 8.

[whitlowe]

Sounds great. I'll take a look at this one also.