How to Recompress and Add Overlays in Microsoft Expression Encoder 2

As you may know, in order to just deliver the best quality to viewers, you want to avoid compressing and recompressing a clip because with each compression pass the quality of the clip just gets a little worse. So in this case the ideal result would be to save out the clip without recompressing it and just leave out the extra frames. The trouble is when the file is compressed it uses key frames that are spread out throughout the file and to save bits there are long groups of pictures or gaps where the file only saves the changes from one frame to the next.

Since it is unlikely that this cut falls precisely on two key frames, the video is likely to jump during playback. In most applications, the only solution at this point is to recompress the whole clip and lose the generation. But with Encoder II, we have a great new feature called Smart Recompression. By exporting your clip to the same format that it came in with, Encoder will only recompress the portion of the timeline that it has to and will preserve the original quality wherever it can so your content stays as clean as it can be.

This is a really cool feature. For now let us go back to Streaming 512 DSL and let us add a leader. You might have a pre-rendered piece of video that you want to put on the front of bunch of different clips and Encoder makes it really easy, just click on the little Add Leader to Source button down here. This will let you navigate to a leader file. I have got one here on my folder, I am going to click Open and now you will see this green bar in the timeline represent the leader that we just added which then transitions into our clip.

Also, you might want to add a watermark to a video file to identify it on the web for example. And maybe you want to point people back to your website while adding a watermark or a bug is easy in Encoder. In our Enhance Pane we have an option down here called Overlay. And if we click on Add Overlay, we can then find the file that we want to use for our bug.

You can import any media file that you want but in this case, I am going to bring in a QuickTime file that was created in after effects and saved with an Alpha channel so it has got pre-built transparency to it. Then I click Open and you will see that by default it gets added in the lower right-hand corner of the screen, kind of assuming that it wants to be a bug.

So we can resize it by using the controls here and you can also adjust sizing by dragging around on the controls that you see in the pallet. You can adjust the position this way as well or just drag it on screen anywhere that you like. More importantly, you can adjust when the bug shows up. For example, I do not want it to start at the very beginning of the video and then loop continuously.

Because the first thing I am going to do, is turn off looping and the second thing I am going to do is jump out to about 15 seconds where I think the bug should start and under duration, the default says main video only, I am going to change that to Custom, click Update on my start point and that will add in my current time position as the start point for the bug.

You will see the little orange line down here gives you visual feedback for your overlay, and now as we click in drag you can see that our little Silverlight bug renders nicely over the corner of the screen.