Subtitles of the Movie

In this video we'll explore how to preview different presets for our video exports and how to select the best possible one and how to adjust those previews. Let's start with the video that we're exporting to the Flash Video Format. Now, the Preset that we selected is Web Medium. What does that mean? What size will the exported video be? We can explore those settings in detail and tweak them two ways. One, by clicking on the Settings button and the second by just clicking on the link that goes with the video. Now the first thing I want to do in the Settings dialog is to choose the Output window, drag the Tapehead and get a sense of how this video will look in the Export Format. If you look carefully you'll notice that a little letterboxing appears on the left and right side of the video. If I switch to the Source tab you'll see that that letterboxing isn't there. Back in the Output tab you see the black strips on the right and left side of the video. That's because the Aspect Ratio, that is the relative dimensions of the video, are adjusted a bit in this Preset. Let's take a look at some other settings, but before we do let's see exactly what file size the Media Encoder means by Medium. Well, we can see that the Output, we can see this both in the Preview section and in the lower right, is 360 pixels wide by 264 pixels high, so now we know what Web Medium means. Let's take a look at some other options. Sticking with a video that can be played in the Flash 8 Player, let's see what happens if we go to Medium Wide Screen Source. Well, that creates even more letterboxing over in our Output size. It creates a file that's even more stretched rectangle and not a good fit for our video. Let's try another Preset. The Web Small setting gives us a video that's 328 pixels wide by 240 pixels high. There's very little letterboxing and will hardly be noticeable in a Player and this might well turn out to be an acceptable export setting. In a later video I'll show you how to fine-tune the export size of a video using a few different techniques, but for now we'll explore this Preset, and it's pretty close to what we need. Let me show you a few other features that you can choose while you're in the Export Settings dialog. In the Basic Video Settings if, for some reason, you want to revert to the Sorenson Spark Codec, something that was used a few years ago and doesn't provide quite the same compression or quality as the current standard, you can switch that by checking that option. Now you'll notice in the bottom of the screen that that actually increased the Estimated File Size from 3 Megabytes to 4 Megabytes. Also, if for whatever reason you're working with a technology that requires an Encoded Alpha Channel that checkbox is available here as well. So, we've explored our settings, we've chosen one that we like and actually we ended up customizing it a bit because we twiddled around with the Video Settings. But basically the setting that we're going with is Web Small, plays in Flash 8 or higher. So we can select OK, we've got one Export Setting selected. Let's take a look at the next video in our Queue. Now this one is set up to be exported in a format that's good for an Apple iPod, Small. Let's see what that means. And again, I can check the video and either click on the link or click on the Settings button to open this in the Settings dialog. And when I do I can see that in the Output tab the video does not distort and there's no letterboxing. That's because this particular Export Preset creates a video that's exactly half the width and half the height of my original and that will be a pretty nice size for an Apple iPod. I don't see any reason to mess around with any of the settings here, so we will OK this video. Now I set up one other Export and that is to take my original video, created in iMovie for the web and create a TV-sized version of it using the NTSC DV Preset. That's a Preset that works generally well with many TVs. Let's take a look at what the settings for that option actually look like and, again, I'll click on the Settings button and when I preview the video and switch to the Output tab and I will zoom out to 25 percent, I can see some letterboxing here as well. Now, one thing I just want to show you because it's something that you undoubtedly have encountered and that is that when you export to different QuickTime Settings like, for example, PAL DV Widescreen, you actually distort the video. I'm going back to the Source tab on the left side of the Preview dialog and back to the Output tab and by going back and forth I can see that I'm going to get that kind of weird funhouse mirror stretching that you see sometimes when videos created for the web are exported for TV. Well, that's not a look that I want. I get a much more consistent and less distorted look with the NTSC DV albeit with a little bit of letterboxing but again, nothing that's really going to ruin the video. And again, for those of you who are experts at compression technology, you can change from the default Codec, which in almost every case is just fine, to another Codec if you wish. And, for QuickTime exporting you can also adjust Quality. So, having made all these setting selections we're now ready to start the Queue and export all three of our videos to three different formats with Presets that we've explored, examined, tested out and chosen. I'm going to start the Queue, the video will fade out, but you can see my videos beginning to get converted to the Export Formats we've selected.