Once you are proficient at making and encoding videos, you may become dissatisfied with how much you can do. Most of the things I learned in this section pertain to the use of Final Cut Pro and Cleaner 5. Using these two software packages can make a very noticable difference to how your videos look and how much bandwidth they consume.
NTSC format has a problem which is difficult to comprehend when described in words, but easy to understand when you see it. (I am going to describe this as I understand it, if I am wrong, someone please correct me!). Earlier I mentioned that NTSC cameras film at 30fps, well actually they film at 60fps. The camera takes two frames separated in time by one sixtieth of a second and "interlaces" them together in a series of alternating thin horizontal stripes to make a single frame. I cannot explain better than this. If you do not understand, capture a single video frame in which there is some reasonably fast movement and open it up in Photoshop or something equivalent. You will see the two images separating out from each other. It looks absolutely terrible and the problem will become obvious. The solution is to apply a de-interlace filter in FCP (or the video editing software of your choice.) FCP simply separates out the two images and lets you choose one or the other and also fills in the gaps so well that my untrained eye cannot tell that there were ever any gaps at all. How much problem the interlace will be depends on the codec you are using (I think). I remember when using H.263, things just appeared a little blurry at the edges except when things were moving really fast. Then you could notice that every object had a shadow of itself lagging behind it. Sorenson 3 on the other hand is quite unforgiving. Any movement at all and you can see the comb-like edges on every moving object where the interlace is separating out. I de-interlace everything now, it has become a habit.
Good video editing software has lots of excellent filters which will make your picture look much better when viewed on a computer screen. Without colour correction, brightening up and sharpening of the image, the final product can look extremely dull and dirty. This is probably a reflection on my poor filming and lighting techniques. There is one important filter problem which I will discuss in detail below.
One of the most important filters which you must use is the gamma correction filter. It offers a single slider which will brighten or darken your image depending on which way you slide it. The beauty is that gamma correction is non-linear. It brightens/darkens the mid-range tones while it does not affect the white tones or the black tones in the picture. In this way it is much more effective than just turning up the brightness. Export a video without gamma correction and you will see that it looks just way too dark and dull on the computer screen.
Of course there is a catch. Windows machines and Macs display the brightness of their colours in very different ways which I do not fully understand. The end result is that a video which looks fine on my Mac appears so dark on a PC screen that you cannot see anything. This is the cross-platform gamma problem. The easiest solution is to compromise with the gamma correction. If you are editing on a Mac, slide the gamma correction slider a little lighter than optimal. If you are working on a Windows machine, make the video a little darker than you think it should look. A little experience is useful here. Just keep on practicing until you are satisfied with the result. There are more sophisticated solutions to this problem such as having multiple versions of the same video available, but I have not tried any of them.
When all was said and done, the average file size of the videos I was making was about double or triple what I wanted. There is only so much you can do with choice of codec and reduction of the frame rate. The reduction of the display quality in FCP can have a good effect, but the algorithms employed are quite limited. You need to have software which is dedicated to the task of compression. That is when I heard about Cleaner 5 (thanks to Dr Vawter.) Cleaner is expensive, but good at what it does. Now whenever I feel that my final video which I exported from FCP is too big, I go back and export the final sequence in FCP as a self contained (high quality) FCP movie. I then import that movie into Cleaner. Cleaner has a vast number of settings you can tweak and a full brace of filters. I find however that these filters are not quite as optimal as those in FCP, so I try not to use them in Cleaner. I am not going to cover all the little tricks you can use otherwise this would become a Cleaner tutorial. Again, best to play around and read the manual. The Cleaner manual is reasonably short and to the point (unlike the FCP manual which is way too big and tells you nothing.) The nicest feature of Cleaner is that you can limit the final file size. If I want a 1Mb file at the end, I just tell Cleaner this and it does the rest.
This may seem somewhat surprising (it still surprises me), but if you can serve cleaner with a higher quality picture, it can do a much better job with the compression. The most amazing thing is that I have been able to reduce file sizes by (I am guessing now) a factor of 2 on average and still maintain a picture of about equal quality to what I had using a bad camera. A good camera not only gives you a better picture, it lets you compress stuff more.