(Photo from muteboy)
Here at Motionographer HQ, we spend a lot of time looking at motion graphics websites from around the world. Over the last four years of running this site (and its predecessor), I’ve seen a few ideas that work—and a few thousand that don’t. This is a short list of my best advice for creating useful, enjoyable web experiences that showcase your motion work.
1. Use QuickTime (with Fast Start).
While Flash may be the most ubiquitous media player on the web (more on Flash later), QuickTime is still the industry standard format for distribution. Some reasons for this:
- Easily downloadable
- Easily scrubbable
- Huge array of supported codecs
Perhaps the biggest reason, tough, has to do with your audience. Your site is targeted at designers, producers, agencies and other video-savvy clients. Call it brand fascism, but QuickTime is currently the expected choice for distribution. Anything else (AVIs, FLVs or, god forbid, OGMs) are regarded with a mixture of suspicion and disdain.
It’s like wearing pink to a black-and-white party. Sure, that inner rebel in you wants to do it, but you’ll be standing alone in the corner nursing a stiff martini most of the night.
Using Fast Start with Compressed Headers
One more thing on the QuickTime tip: For god’s sake, please use fast start. If you don’t enable the fast start option when compressing your video, your viewers will have to wait for your entire video to load before they see the first frame. For longer form projects, like music videos and short films, this can be reason enough for someone to skip your project entirely.

Using Fast Start is easy, but it requires QuickTime Pro (or Compressor). Here’s how to do it:
- Open your video in QuickTime.
- Go to File > Export…
- In the Export drop-down, select Movie to QuickTime Movie and click Options….
- Configure your video and audio compression settings however you like.
- Here’s the crucial part: Make sure to check Prepare for Internet Streaming and choose Fast Start - Compressed Header from the drop-down menu.
The compressed header option losslessly crunches your movie’s header information and allows for an even quicker playback experience than fast start alone. The only reason you wouldn’t want to use the compressed header option is if you expected someone to watch your QuickTime using a player that doesn’t support compressed headers (like Quicktime for Linux and/or older, lesser known players).