Optimizing videos for multiplatform delivery

- Let's take a look at a couple of essential techniques that you'll need when preparing content for sharing on your publishing network. Let's start with video. First up, you're going to need a tool to optimize the video. The good news is that if you're using most nonlinear editing tools, they have this functionality built in, but you'll also find that both Apple and Adobe make dedicated utilities that work hand in hand with their video editors to get more done. There's also a wealth of third-party tools available at different price points. And you see a few of those listed here. It really comes down to personal preference as most of these tools do the same thing at this point, but some tools are faster or have better integration between certain products. Additionally, one tactic that I strongly suggest you explore is the use of variable bit rate compression. This allows you to analyze the video file and take a second pass at optimizing it. It'll basically adjust the quality of the video as needed. So if you encounter a more visually complex scene, the quality goes up. And if it's more simple, it goes down, lowering the bandwidth. This is quite useful so that the visual quality is maintained. It ultimately leads to typically smaller file sizes because while first analyzing the file and then compressing it, you end up with better overall quality and a reduction in file size. However, the drawback here is that it does take a fair amount of time to do, effectively twice as long, so only do this when you're getting ready to output the final video. When you make video for the web and social media, there's lots of formats that you could upload. And here's a list of those. But what it really comes down to these days is most platforms are going to strongly prefer the MPEG4 format. The reason why we stick with primarily this format is mobile phones. So much video is consumed on mobile devices. And while the H.265 is more space efficient and better visual quality format, the H.264 or MPEG4 files are more broadly compatible with hardware chips available in a lot of smartphones. Let me give you a quick walkthrough on how to make one of these files. I've switched over to Premiere Pro here and I have a finished project. This is a trailer video that was made for a legal software company. What I can do when I'm ready is choose File > Export > Media. Now, if it's grayed out, make sure your timeline or program panel is active. A new dialog opens. It all comes down to the formats. If you click at the top here, you'll see a wealth of options, but the H.264 is the more common one or the newer H.265 if you're going for really high visual quality, but a mostly web-based audience. It will work with many smartphones, but the H.264 is broader. Now, once you've done this, you'll see a variety of presets available, including ones that are specifically optimized to platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Vimeo, and YouTube. You can just scroll through to select these. If you want even more control though, you can click the button here for Queue. Queuing will hand the project off to Adobe Media Encoder, which is a companion tool that ships with Adobe's video applications. This tool has more control over the quality and has some better options for targeting mobile devices. You'll see, for example, that it queued it up with the last used setting. But if I come down here to the project browser, I can actually see things organized by output. For example, devices, mobile. This allows me to target mobile phones specifically with an optimized for phone preset, or if we scroll through here, you'll see web video and social media. Now we can add multiple presets, for example, a 4K option here, and we'll just drag that onto our file. I'll get rid of this one. And let's also get one for Vimeo. And you see they're added. I'd suggest that you actually click here and modify the names so you know which one goes where. Additionally, you can click to open up the settings. Notice that it tells you what's happening. And if you scroll through, there's more choices. For example, some of these support directly publishing. So you can actually choose to log into your Facebook account and have it upload the video itself. This could be quite useful and a big time saver. So as soon as it's done it, it posts it. Also, you could take a look at some of the settings. For example, under the video tab, not only can I adjust the size here, but I could see the ability to use maximum quality here for bit depth for richer color. If I scroll through here and take a look at bit rate settings, I could choose that higher quality option for two pass VBR. This is going to give us the smallest file size and the richest visual quality. I can also click metadata to modify those ID3 tags and embed file information, such as the creator and the name of the website. When set, I click OK. Let's do the same here for Vimeo and just scroll down in the video section and again choose that option under bit rate, bumping up to the two pass VBR. And if I need to, I can even increase the target bit rates. Notice here that Vimeo is going with 48 and 60. If I take a look at Facebook and explore those settings, you'll see it's using half the image quality here to optimize for Facebook's preferences. So the Vimeo in code is going to be sizeably larger, but a better source file if it gets recompressed or shared to other platforms. Now, once I'm all set, I just click the play button to start the process and the encoding begins. You can track the progress here at the bottom. And when it's all done, the files will be ready for upload to other services.