Virtual Open Day for Conservatorium Maastricht

Panos/Objects created with Pano2VR/Object2VR/Pano2QTVR. You are welcome to post your recent creations here.
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BdeWal
Posts: 2
Joined: Sat May 30, 2020 3:34 pm

Hey everyone!

Just finished my first panorama project :) a virtual open day for Conservatorium Maastricht.

You can find the tour here: https://www.virtualconservatoriummaastricht.nl/

Love to hear what you think of it! The working on mobile is not optimal, still working on my skills there. But on PC it works like a charm so far.

All the best!
benu
Posts: 9
Joined: Fri Nov 13, 2020 8:36 pm

A very useful tour for prospective students!

The video files weren't loading fast enough, and kept hanging....
I downloaded one of the files (1 - About Maastricht.mp4) and found it was 119MB, around 20 Mbps, which is waaaay too data-heavy, in my opinion, for an online venue.

I re-compressed that video file at 1.8 Mbps in Adobe Media Encoder (a custom H.264 preset where the only thing I changed from default settings were the video Bitrate to VBR 2-pass, 1.8Mbps target, 2.2 Mbps maximum; along with changing the audio to 32000 Hz, 192kbps bitrate) which gave me a 12MB file, still with good quality. Dialing it down to 1.2Mbps came to 8.2MB; the quality starts to noticeably drop a little at this point, though in my experience most users don't notice. Changing to 0.64Mbps gave me a 5MB file, which is nice and small for this sort of thing, but the video was too poor for my tastes. I'd use 1.2Mbps for videos, or 1.8Mbps if I really really had to. I probably wouldn't go higher than that, though — 2.4Mbps if they begged me, and 3.6 if we were entirely insane. But I'd push for 1.8 or lower.

Users MIGHT notice a drop in quality on a video, but they will DEFINITELY notice when the video freezes when it isn't downloading fast enough.
There's always some quality compromise for the sake of speed and user experience.

What's nice about this, though, is you can just swap out the video files on the web server once you've re-compressed them. You don't need to change anything else (as long as the file names don't change!).

Here are the different compression levels for reference:

1.8 Mbps version (12MB)
1.2 Mbps version (8MB)
0.64 Mbps version (5MB)

And as a reference here is the Original (20Mbps) Version (119MB).

I might note that if you watch the ORIGINAL first, you'll be tempted to look for all the differences and compromises in the smaller versions. But keep in mind that users aren't going to do be able to do that. They just want it to watch the video without disruption, and to be able to understand the content. I find clients struggle with this concept — they paid for high-quality video, so put the high-quality video up there! These days I usually find a happy compromise without saying anything to them, and they're generally happy with the result. And for what it's worth, YouTube is a great way to have multiple levels of quality for different bandwidth levels. HTH

-ben
BdeWal
Posts: 2
Joined: Sat May 30, 2020 3:34 pm

Hi Ben, sorry, totally missed your reply. Thank you so much for your constructive feedback! We're doing a revision at this moment, cleaning up some minor issues etc. So I will definitely take this into account, thanks again :D

All the best, Bas
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