Submitted Question:
We have made great progress down here in CT and we are successfully
doing school wide broadcasts with VC...We have also set up a free SchoolTube channel
and we are trying to put our broadcasts up. Here is my question.
When you publish or export your videos from VC to put them up on
SchoolTube.... what procedure are you using... What format... etc. ?
We have exported the videos as WMV... then used Quicktime to export
them for Web use as M4V videos.
No need to publish multiple versions if I understand you correctly. We publish our shows only once as WMV in the custom profile size. The only change I made was the bitrate. The default bitrate is 1000 kbps I believe, and I lowered it to 800kbps. The SchoolTube folks tell me that their system re-encodes your files anyways at a max bitrate of 800k anyways, so no need to encode any higher than 800k. See their encoding recommendations on their site here.
From memory, here are the specs on that custom WMV encoding profile I use:
640x480, 800kbps Constant Bitrate, single pass. Audio is 128k, 44khz constant bitrate.
With that method, we can keep our shows under 100 meg (SchoolTube's upload size limitation). I'd say a 100meg file would be a show arund 12 mins or so? Our shows are usually 7-8 mins each day. Now onto your next question...
The video plays fine on our
computer... everything is great. When we upload it to School Tube...
the video is all there and so is the audio... but they are out of
sync...
Our School Channel page address is as follows
http://www.schooltube.com/user/Northwestern
I have spoken with the School Tube folks and they seemed to think it
was an issue on my end. Any help would be appreciated. I see your
videos are perfectly in sync.
I'm guessing this is related to your microphone connection. If you read through this blog, you'll see plenty of references on how to connect your mic(s) properly to avoid any sync issues. Connecting your mic (or mixer's output if using multiple mics like we do) should be fed into the firewire camcorders mic input jack. Then you tell VC that the mic input is on camera 1, not on the soundcard. You should avoid connecting any mics directly to the soundcard. Instead, mics connect directly to the camera (assuming your camera has a mic input jack like the camera model I recommend). This is covered in chapter 5 of my Training DVD volume 1 in great detail.
Hope that helps, let us know below by leaving comments or questions.
One other thing to keep in mind regarding video sync issues is the framerate. We (SchoolTube) try to encode all of our videos in the input framerate (normally 23 or 29 fps) but if your camera is capturing at an odd framerate, this could cause audio sync issues. Another possible problem is the re-encoding via Quicktime. We accept WMV files, so as Rob said, there's no need to re-encode. If the file that you upload to the site is correct on at least 2 PCs, but you're still having trouble getting the audio sync'ed up, send in a support ticket and reference this post & I'll see what I can do.
-Michael
I have a question on publishing that is driving me nuts. I upgraded my graphics card as you suggested and it is so much better. But if I use one of AVC studio sets and have the background movie playing through the window of the set it records, reviews just fine, but it won't publish the background going on behind the studio set.
I'm glad the newer video card worked out better...not too sure though about the other issue. There have been known issues with virtual sets, some features that I recall working in VC2 might not work with VC3. As long as you see it upon reviewing, it "should" work OK with publishing as long as the file exists locally on a hard drive still (not network drive or external drive). Maybe try publishing to a different format (WMV or AVI)? Let us know if you discover more...