In the first edition of this month’s Affordable HD enewsletter, we keep the focus on the Apple Mac Pro, specifically analyzing the optimal memory configurations for editing and encoding with Apple Final Cut Studio, Adobe Creative Suite 4, and Telestream Episode Engine. I looked at several scenarios. Figure 1. The Apple Mac Pro’s memory tray. First, I tested performance at …

I’m writing a story for Digital Content Producer on producing MPEG-2 video from HD source in Final Cut Pro/Compressor. Which plug-ins are best? – I’m trying to get Cinema Craft in, but they’re not responding to my emails. – I’ve got a trial version of Bitvise. – I’ll try Telestream Episode and Sorenson Squeeze. Are there any others that I …

Just finished watching an interesting video entitled Video Case Studies – Top 10 Tips, which was produced by UK video producer Aspect Film and Video. You can watch it here, though you may need to sign in first. The top ten tips were (drumroll please): 1. Structure – have customer identify business challenge, then action you took, then beneficial results. …

OK, being somewhat of a jerk here with the headline, but I’ve been pretty public in my thoughts that it’s time to transition from VP6 to H.264. Still, if you’re not ready for that move, perhaps you might want to rethink your current VP6 encoding parameters. If so, you might find this data, gleaned from multiple broadcast sites, useful. Hope …

Whenever I speak in public about streaming production, I try to back up my recommendations with file parameters gathered from prominent media and corporate sites. Here are some file statistics gathered for a series of sessions that I taught this spring and summer. Information from the first slide was gathered from about 50 corporate and media sites, which I divided …

As part of my First Looks review of VP8 and WebM for StreamingMedia.com, ran a bunch of VP8 and H.264 comparisons, initially using the MainConcept H.264 codec, since that’s the codec included with Sorenson Squeeze, which I used to produce the VP8 files. Then, I added some comparison files produced using the x264 codec, encoding via the QuickTime-based x264Encoder version …

From my general perspective, HTML5 has been lots of smoke with very little fire, in part because it’s not yet a complete spec that meets the needs of large scale video publisher. Though Google/YouTube has been an avid HTML5 proponent, a recent blog post from YouTube programmer John Harding identifies why YouTube won’t abandon Flash any time soon. Entitled “Flash …

June – 2010 – OK, it was just one department of the Navy – the Carderock Division in West Bethesda, Maryland. According to their web site, “Carderock Division is the principal Navy resource, national focal point and international leader in surface and undersea vehicle science, ship systems and related maritime technology. A major technical component of the Naval Sea Systems …

The launch of Adobe CS5 brings to bear the obvious comparison with Final Cut Studio (FCS). Since life has been far too quiet lately, I decided to tackle this subject, but from the perspective of the totally new user, not the experienced user who would rather fight than switch. In other words, what would you say if a total newbie …

June 23, 2010 – Just back from a day and 1/2 of streaming related training at the National Institute of Health in Bethesda, Maryland. The Agency was transitioning from a Real Networks-based system over to Flash, and wanted a general introduction to Flash and current practices of streaming producers. Here’s the agenda, and you can download a detailed outline of …