Improved video quality on AnimationHUT.TV

Well, the new site AnimationHUT.TV has only been up for a couple of days but I've already done an important improvement. The video quality is now better.

I am well aware of the fact that animators really hate videos that look compressed and deteriorated. After all, we spend hours, days, weeks, months, and sometimes years working on animation and I really don't think we are too picky if we expect it to look decent on the internet.

At this point the site only has a few members, as I haven't even started promoting it, yet. But one member pointed out that I should fix the video quality as soon as possible. I can't say that I disagreed with him, so I got to work right away.

At this time I was able to improve the video quality by changing a setting in the admin panel. The video quality has improved, but I know it can still be better. If I had the ind of budget that YouTube has, this would not be an issue, but with the limited resources that I have, it takes time to get everything just right. But it's getting there...

But of course, the source file is just as important as the work that I do, to improve video quality. If you submit a movie that is too small in size, the video converter on the site will expand the video and the results will be less then satisfactory. This was actually the problem with some of the videos I was uploading. But I am in the process of replacing them.

So, make sure your videos are at least 300x240.

The good news is that I set up the site to archive the original video files into a separate folder, as it is re-formating the videos, during the upload process. This means that if at some later time there will be a better converter available, I will be able to re-render all the videos, using the original files that were captures during your uploads. So, in simple terms, this means that one day you may log onto the site and notice that the quality of your videos seems to have spontaneously improved, overnight.

Another thing you can do at your end is to make sure your videos are not over-saturated. Animation can use a lot of primary colors and if you over-saturate the image it will look less then perfect when it's compressed. So, make sure the colors are not too saturated.

So, I'm working at my end, to improve the quality of videos, but you can also follow these simple guidelines to make sure your source files are as god as they can be.