Workflow for trimming, encoding, and publishing videos to the web

Question

Basically, companies will be giving us access to a variety of videos in a variety of formats. We will then download the videos, trim out the important part in a 5 min and/or 10 min chunk. From there, we want to encode the video to a variety of web (mp4) qualities. Initially we will only have 1, maybe 2 people doing the process.

Workflow:

• Download video to local computer
• Import video to Vegas Movie Studio
• Trim video & export to the highest quality we'll be publishing at

.

• Place video in local watch folder for a local encoder (Sorenson Squeeze Desktop) which will encode the video to the pre-defined outputs.

OR

• Manually upload videos to a server that is being watched by Zencoder/Encoding.com/Sorenson Server which will encode the video to the pre-defined outputs and sends to main server.

.

• Main server watches for completed encodings and automatically publishes them on the site as we please.

There are a few issues I see with this workflow. First off, we are re-encoding the video after trimming, then encoding it AGAIN to all of the desired outputs. And second, the issue of uploading all of the files from a local computer to a server could be time consuming depending on the upload speed.

Is there a better, more time efficient, and/or more money saving workflow to this?

Answer 1

If you are willing to use Adobe products, Premiere supports direct integration with Adobe Media Encoder and can be set with presets that include multiple output formats and sizes. Each encoding runs off the actual main project, thus you remove the extra generation of loss.

Alternately, using a lossless quality intermediate file will prevent issues as no additional quality will be lost going from the source material to the intermediate output.

A big pipe is the only answer to the second problem. Encoding to the final format locally will save on bandwidth, but you have to transfer the file at some point and final output is the smallest amount of data possible unless you are making an awfully large number of different sizes of each video.