Streaming Learning Center

I was preparing for a webinar last week and scanned 46 websites to see how many used HTML5 as the primary playback option for video. This was a mix of media sites (14), business to consumer sites (22) and business to business sites (10). The answer was 1 - Wikipedia - with YouTube offering HTML5 as an alternative to Flash. Even Apple - the sugar doesn't melt in my mouth, we believe in open standards -- poster child for HTML5, uses the QuickTime plug-in for displaying video on Apple.com.

That got me thinking; why would any site where video was mission critical use HTML5 today, or even in the near term? There’s no standardized way to protect their content, no streaming server that can efficiently dole the content out to multiple viewers on different browsers and no scheme for adaptive streaming. There isn’t even full support for all advertising servers.

Looking at it from the other direction, the installed base of HTML5 compatible browsers is only around 40-50%, depending upon who you ask, and you need to produce using at least two, perhaps three codecs to service those browsers. That made me realize that HTML5 is a FUD and media driven fiction that won't be widely relevant for at least three or four years, and then only if the relevant parties make some hard decisions that they've as of yet shied away from.

So here are my five key myths about HTML5.

You've got an H.264-based MOV file that you want to use for Flash production, but it won't load into Flash or Flash Catalyst. Can you simply change the extension from MOV to F4V? If you're encoding the file, should you choose None, Fast Start or Fast Start - Compressed Header when producing for progressive download. Click over to the main articles for the answers to these question and more.

Firewall vendor WatchGuard Technologies uses video aggressively in their marketing efforts, and produces some of the most focused and highest quality case studies that I've seen, though the presentation of these videos on their web site could definitely be improved. In this "peer review" video, I review their case study of the Burlington Public Library, which you can watch here on YouTube.

I detail what the producers of the video did right production-wise, and what went wrong on their web site. Click the link above to view the video; I hope you find it useful.

Of all the skills necessary to successfully edit video, one of the most important is brightness and color correction. To understand how to adjust brightness and color optimally, you have to know how to read a waveform monitor.

In this tutorial, first we'll learn how to enter Final Cut Pro's color correction mode and read the waveform monitor. Then we'll learn how to diagnose and correct a range of brightness and color related problems Using Final cut Pro's Color Corrector effect. Click over to the main article to view the tutorial.