Case Study: Apple.com

by Jason Wolf

In this case study, I'll put the techniques you learned in Chapter 13, "Minimizing Multimedia," to work optimizing a video that was done for Apple Computer.

First take a look at Figure 14.1. This is the movie that needs to be compressed. The raw video footage is about a minute long and over 500 megabytes in size . Realistically, this file needs to be under 20 megabytes to play well from a CD and even smaller to play off the Internet.

Figure 14.1. The raw, uncompressed video is over 500 megabytes in size.

This example uses Cleaner (http://www.discreet.com) for the compression because it is the best video encoder and allows one video to be compressed in many different formats.

Within Cleaner, there are tabs that categorize the functions you can perform on your movie. Each category holds a group of functions such as Audio or Encode that allow you to control that specific aspect of your compression.