We offer a Premium Encoding service that transcodes whatever videos you upload and ensures they are in the correct format for streaming via the Wolfe Video player on a range of devices. While our premium encoder accepts pretty much any common video codec, some things can cause problems.

Here’s a list of what NOT TO DO:

• Do not upload videos in Apple ProRes format.
• Do not upload videos with chapter markers. They will prevent your video from streaming. Read more about chapter markers here.
• Do not upload videos with uncompressed PCM audio. You should compress audio with AAC at 320kbps or lower.
• Do not upload videos with no audio (if you have a silent film, please get in touch with us first to discuss your options).
• Do not upload videos with surround sound. All uploads should have audio mixed down to 2-channel stereo sound.
• Do not upload files that are bigger than they need to be. Video data rate should never be more than 5000kbps (and should normally be much lower – see below). A 2-minute HD trailer should never be more than about 55MB. An SD video should be much smaller. The maximum file size we accept is 5GB, but typically your files should be much smaller.
• Do not upload letter-boxed or pillar-boxed videos (this means no black bars above or below or on the sides of the image). All videos should be in their correct display aspect ratio with square pixels. See our recommended dimensions list below.
• Trailers cannot be longer than 5 minutes. They should really be less than 3 minutes. Films or extras you are selling can be any length, as long as the file size is below 5GB.
• If you upload files that don’t meet our recommended settings and the transcode fails, do not upload the file again. Wait for us to get in touch with you. It never helps to upload the same file more than once.
• If you upload incompatible or overly large files, not only does it take you a long time, but it costs us money, wastes our time, and makes your transcode more likely to fail. You’re much better off following our guidelines below, or even using one of our preset files for Handbrake.
• Do not edit your video after you’ve encoded it. If you accidentally left the countdown or some other pre-roll at the start of the video, don’t try to remove it with Quicktime Player – this will appear to work fine on your machine but once we transcode it, it may go out of synch. You should do all your edits in the NLE before you export, and then encode the final export version and upload it.
• If you don’t know what you’re doing, find someone who does!

Recommended Encode Settings

To make things easier, we have recommendations to prepare your files for Wolfe Video. Just click your source format below to see the recommended maximum quality settings. If your film is not 4:3 or 16:9 and you are using a different aspect ratio, you should set the width and height to the native aspect ratio with square pixels (see our aspect ratio guidelines below).

The encoding recommendations below are guidelines for most common video formats:

High Definition Widescreen (16:9)

Standard Definition Widescreen (16:9)

Classic Academy Ratio (4:3)

All videos must be in the correct aspect ratio with square pixels!

Your videos MUST be in the correct display aspect ratio with square pixels. Otherwise your video will playback stretched or squashed. Many video formats use non-square pixels, including DVDs, DV, HDV, and a lot of other HD formats. These pixels are stretched on some TVs, but screens don’t always stretch or squash the image back to normal correctly, so you need to correct the pixel aspect ratio and image aspect ratio before uploading. Note: you should NEVER use letter-boxing or pillar-boxing (these are the black bars that appear above/below or on the sides of the video to “fake” an aspect ratio on a different display). If we see a video uploaded to our system that is letter-boxed or is in the wrong aspect ratio, we will ask you to re-upload, and there may be a penalty for this. So, to help you avoid these pitfalls, here’s a handy guide to help you set the correct frame dimensions when outputting your video from your non-linear editor.

Aspect Ratio Guide:

You can upload higher quality files, but it will take a lot longer to upload and process. Our current file-size limit is 5GB, but some web browsers have trouble with files larger than 2GB. Since HD feature films are often larger than 2GB, we recommend you use the Chrome browser since it will support larger file uploads.

If you need help exporting video files, there are some useful tutorials on Vimeo for different software packages (we can also transcode videos encoded according to their recommendations). If you don’t have professional encoding software, we recommend Handbrake or MPEG StreamClip because they are free, relatively simple and deliver good quality encoding. Handbrake has a useful feature that lets you set quality by “target size” instead of bitrate, ensuring your encode will be the maximum quality that fits under our upload limit. We have preset files available for Handbrake – just click the options above to reveal download links. If you use Handbrake, make sure you de-select chapter markers before encoding.

Wolfe Video can play higher than DVD quality videos so you should normally work from the masters and not from a DVD, but if you don’t have the original files and only have the DVD to use as a master, we have some special options for you. See the instructions on how to upload from DVD.