A continuing series of questions from an ‘Net acquaintance on whether to post on YouTube or Vimeo.  Question: Incidentally, I heard that Vimeo encoded 720p at higher bitrates than YouTube (or that it had more bandwidth to serve it, or both… can’t remember!).  Do you prefer to use YouTube @ 720p for other reasons? Answer: I test with YouTube because …

Got a question from an acquaintance on the best strategy for uploading files to YouTube, and I thought it might have broader interest, so here’s the Q & A. Question: I was wondering, since YouTube doesn’t appear to be using B-Frames in its encoding, is there any reason to send files to YouTube that have been encoded with B-Frames?  Ie …

This is a video from a session at Streaming Media West. In addition to the production/pre-processing and encoding tips, it’s a unique opportunity to see me – Jan Ozer – as a blonde, which I was for roughly 6 weeks last year (a Halloween thing). Here’s the agenda for the video to give you a rough idea of what I …

Last Friday, I produced a concert for old time band Allegheny Blue to test out the NewTek TriCaster TCXD300.  I uploaded a 720p file to YouTube to present to the band, and when I went to view the file, I noticed that the Google subsidiary had subtly changed the playback interface. Specifically, as you can see on the bottom right …

Last Friday, I produced a concert for old time band Allegheny Blue to test out the NewTek TriCaster TCXD300.  I uploaded a 720p file to YouTube to present to the band, and when I went to view the file, I noticed that the Google subsidiary had subtly changed the playback interface. Though the update turned out more to be interface …

If you want fast or slow motion in your video (like slowing this spinning ballerino), you have two choices: you can adjust the speed in your editor, which can produce interpolation artifacts, or you can adjust the frames per second captured by your camcorder, which should deliver higher quality. If you choose the latter approach, there are three components to …

A Windows 7 upgrade can cost more than $300 for the software alone — is it worth it if you’re a streaming producer looking to shave encoding times? Well, that’s what I detail in this article. By way of background, I had a great testbed for this – a dual processor, quad core 3.33 Ghz Xeon (Nehalem-based) computer from custom …

If you’re a Premiere Pro or Vegas editor, and you’re thinking about purchasing a new system with Windows 7, or upgrading to the new Microsoft OS on a current system, you might want to check out an article that I wrote for Millimeter/Digital Content Producer that you can access here. I compared rendering times with a range of formats and …

As with video, it’s hard to capture audio perfectly. Fortunately, Apple Soundtrack Pro makes it easy to correct many common problems. In this article, I’ll detail how to remove pops and clicks from your audio file, boost volume via normalization, and remove background noise. Note that although Final Cut Pro allows you to perform some of these functions on the timeline, I recommend working …

Webcasting live events used to be complicated and expensive, but a range of products and services—some new, others that have been around for a while—have simplified live event streaming and made it much more affordable. In this article, I’ll identify the relevant live marketplaces and outline key companies and technologies to consider in each market. Let me say up front …