With almost all of our video productions now destined for the web in one way or another, we’re now working with a lot of web designers to encode and prepare video files to work inside their web page designs.  And I almost invariably cringe when I get the answer to the question, “How big (width and height, in pixels), would you like the video file to be?

Time after time, the answer comes back as something that is frighteningly tiny.  And I know that much of the work that goes into acquiring and tuning a spectacular high-definition image is going to be lost in some web designer’s idea of how big (or small) video should be on a page.

Take, for example, this image grabbed (at actual size) from the Goldman Sachs website:

Yes, that’s our Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson in his old job at Goldman.  But the point here is that the video window in this huge player — which takes up a whole page to present navigation widgets to get to other videos, plus a transcript of what he’s saying — is so small (204 pixels wide by 108 high, to be precise) that it requires the viewer to squint in order to take it in.  This may be (barely) OK for talking heads, but when it comes to actually showing us things in video, the miniscule image is useless.

I’m not sure what it is that drives web designers to make video tiny.  It may be that until a few years ago, larger video sized looked awful on web pages.  Primitive encoders made the video look chunky.  Low bandwidth made it jerky.  And the lack of a player standard made it impossible to make video work consistently on all platforms.

But we’re by all that now.  The Flash VP6 and H.264 codecs produce gorgeous web video — at least when a knowledgeable producer is at the controls.  We can pretty much count on there being 500 kilobits per second of bandwidth available to our viewers.  And the ubiquity of Flash on Windows, Macintosh, and Linux computers (but sadly not on iPhones — wake up, Steve Jobs!) means that we don’t have to confuse viewers with a dizzying choice of “Windows Media, QuickTime, or RealMedia”).

Over time, we’ve become very happy with web video encoded at a size of 480 pixels wide by 270 pixels high (for widescreen productions) and 500 kbps bandwidths.  Here’s what it looks like with those specs, applied to a film we recently created for Boston College:

Video like this is experiential, and it’s designed to be viewed immersively.  (In fact, the premiere was on a huge high-definition screen.)  It’s bad enough that most people will listen to the soundtrack on a tiny laptop speaker; to ask them to squint at a postage-stamp image takes the rest of the experience away.

Bandwidth is increasing rapidly, and so are the expectations of web video viewers.  Encoding software is getting better, too, and high-definition web video experiences are already starting to arrive.

So the next time a web designer shows you a web video page design that relegates video to a small window, ask him or her why.  You may well find that they’re living with old assumptions that have been shattered by the quality of today’s web video experience.