I've designed (Photoshop) a website for a small school I run and I'll be working with a web developer to get the site up. I want to have two video-slideshows available which open up and can be viewed at the website. I made the videos using iMovie (an old version). One is about 3 minutes long and the other is 4 minutes. I need to know the best final format, size and specifications to use to ensure the video will look good and play smoothly. If this is something I can do myself with the right conversion software and someone can tell me the correct specifications to use with the software then that would be great. But if this gets technical I would be happy pay someone to do it, but I'm not sure what sort of professional would specialize in conversions (to FLV?, something else?) for optimum web viewing. Are there professionals who specialize in this sort of thing? Appreciate any advice.
Oh, and I should add that having high quality playback is important to me. I don't know enough to put this into numbers, but if Quality Option X would reach 90-100% of viewers easily with not very good quality, and Quality Option Y got me 70% of viewers with much better quality, then I'd take Option Y.
Okay, sorry - I'm such a noob. I suppose if youtube can offer different quality levels I can do that on my website too, right? So I would need to know how to do 2 different conversions - or, as I said, I need to know what professionals specialize in this and I'll let them do their thing.
You should upload a 720p video on youtube and embed it on your site, youtube can manage the best quality to each visitor's internet bandwidth.
As James said, go with YouTube. Upload a high bitrate 1080x720 square pixel video, and let them do the rest. You'll also save on bandwidth if you let YouTube host it. YouTube will encode your video to 360, 480, and 720 versions (and even 1080 if you upload it) - allowing smooth playback for people with all sorts of connections and computers. Vimeo is another good alternative.
You can place it on your own server as well...but the disadvantage is: you'll miss the youtube tagging, and google SERP for your video
FLV (Flash Video) is a proprietary file format used to deliver video over the Internet via Adobe Flash Player (formerly known as Macromedia Flash Player) version 6, 7, 8, or 9. Recently FLV video format is the preferred and most popular video format for web video delivering. A number of notable Websites, such as Youtube, Google video and Reuters, use FLV format. FLV video is supported by all popular browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera…) ,so you can convert your video to flv or swf for your website. If you need, Following is a step by step guide about how to embed flash video in website: http://www.videotoflashmac.com/embed-flash-video-in-website/ Hope it can help you.
I would go for the youtube solution, I consider it to be the best one. Their systems are made specially for video streaming so you don't need to worry about this. Also it is good for SEO and you can even get some visits from it and you also save a lot of bandwidth for your site.
You don't need to convert your video to flash, if you use vimeo or youtube. Use a highest HD-resolution, upload and they convert your video into a decent codec.