Video can be a complicated thing. There has to be a constant balance between having the best quality video available for your viewers and a quick loading time so they don't get bored and leave your site. We have tried our best to make the whole process as painless as possible.
Clover's video system will convert pretty much any video you throw at it. So if you don't consider yourself the next Steven Spielberg, feel free to ignore the rest of this article. But if you have an eye for video and the quality of local car commercials drives you absolutely crazy, feel free to read on!
The goal is to have the best possible quality video to start out with before uploading it to your site. If you start with a bad-looking video, compression and conversion won't magically "heal" it- it will only make it worse. Here are some suggested settings when formatting your videos for upload:
- Large video size 720p (1280x720)
- Quicktime (either .mov or .mp4)
- H.264 Codec (it's the best by far!)
- Video Bit Rate: 2000 kbps
- 48,000 hz Audio
- AAC or MP3 audio, stereo, bit rate: 192 kbps
- 30 or 24 fps (frames per second)
- Don't worry about any other settings (like key frames, filters, profiles, etc)
If you use these settings, you'll end up with a large and high quality file. We'll take care of maintaining the quality, but we'll compress it so that it plays as fast as possible. It will load quickly for your visitors and it will be playable on every operating system and browser (and even most mobile devices!).
If your file ends up being too large (5gb is about the largest that we'd recommend), you may want to try again and make it smaller. The larger it is, the longer it will take to transfer from your computer to your website, and the higher the chance that your internet connection may break during the transfer. (You can find the size by right clicking on the file and choosing "Get Info" on a Mac or "Properties" on a PC).
After you've successfully made a great, HD file, just add it to your site. We'll convert it and take care of the compression so you don't have to worry about any of that stuff.
If you have any trouble at all in this process, please feel free to let us know so we can help you out. You can either give us a call at 805-527-8900, or email us at support@cloversites.com.
Keep In Mind: You will want to make sure that you don't have any special characters used within your filename. We recommend only using letters and numbers in the filename itself. Any special characters (@,#,$,%,/,_,-,",etc) can cause errors when uploading.
Have you thought about using Vimeo?
Vimeo is pretty much the best service around, and their system processes your video really well. If you're especially concerned with quality (or if you want your video to maintain its HD quality), they're really the best option. Go to www.vimeo.com and create an account. You'll upload your videos to Vimeo, then simply embed them in your site. The only real downside is that you'll have Vimeo's player for your videos, but honestly most web-savvy people are used to seeing it around.
YouTube is also another solution that supports bigger files. Go to www.youtube.com to create an account. It is free and supports all kinds of formats!
NOTE: Since the embed code comes from a 3rd party product, Clover Sites is unable to guarantee it'll work consistently throughout your site or the Greenhouse. Because this is an advanced feature, Clover Sites Support is not able to support issues with custom embed/HTML code.
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