Upload Directly from Adobe Creative Suite
The Adobe Creative Suite 4 products come with a helpful application: the Adobe Media Encoder. This app has built-in FTP support, which allows you to upload your Flash animations, Premiere edits or After Effects composites directly to Bits on the Run.
Setup
Adobe Media Encoder works with encoding presets, which you have to apply to files you put in the queue. The screenshot below shows a preset that does a rough first encode and then uploads the video to Bits on the Run. The preset contains both:
- The transcoding settings: H264 video, AAC audio and progressive frames (no interlacing). For 720p HD video, a bitrate of 5000 kbps will be excellent. For SD video, 3000 kbps will be fine.
- The FTP settings: you can use your Bits on the Run login and password for this. The server should be ftp.bitsontherun.com.
Click the image to see it in real-size.
Final Cut & Squeeze
Since FTP is a generic, widely supported protocol, other video software also natively supports it :
- Apple's Final Cut Studio comes with the Compressor transcoding application. Compressor has FTP support too. Setup is similar.
- Sorenson's Squeeze also has FTP support built-in. Again, setup is similar to CS4.
Rough vs Final Transcode
It is also possible to do the final transcode of your videos in Media Encoder, Squeeze or Compressor. To do so within Bits on the Run, you should setup a so-called Passthrough transcoding template. This template will not re-encode your video server side, but will copy it to the CDN.
Note: when using this, you will not benefit from advanced features such as bitrate switching, because bitrate switching requires several transcodes done directly inside Bits on the Run.