Articles

Here’s the PDF from a course on Streaming Production that I taught at StreamingMedia East. Here’s the agenda. I’ve included lots of useful stats, like H.264 encoding parameters used by some high profile web sites (shown below), and averages for high profile media and corporate sites (download PDF to view).

VP8 is now free, but if the quality is substandard, who cares? Well, it turns out that the quality isn’t substandard, so that’s not an issue, but neither is it twice the quality of H.264 at half the bandwidth. See for yourself, below. To set the table, Sorenson Media was kind enough to encode these comparison files for me to …

I produced my first live webcast on May 8, 2010. Like everything else, there were some huge lessons that didn’t become obvious until I was there in the chair, broadcasting live. If you’ve got your first live webcast coming up, perhaps you’ll find them useful By way of background, this was an event sponsored by Grayson Landcare, a “community-based group …

You can learn how to shoot video in one of two ways. You can apprentice under the direction of an experienced videographer who’s done it all and seen it all, and leverage the lessons he or she has learned over the years. Or, you can book the jobs, buy the gear, do your research, and shoot the shoot. Though the …

Includes the handout from my session at StreamingMedia East

MIX10 is the annual Microsoft event for web developers and designers, and the big news from this year’s conference was expanded HTML5 support in Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), including support for the audio and video tags. Basically, this means that when IE9 ships (Microsoft didn’t announce a ship date), it will play video without a plug-in such as Flash or …

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 …

I recently reviewed ten case-study videos on the Internet to choose one to review for StreamingMedia.com, and my review of that video will appear soon. I evaluated multiple factors in choosing a winner, including marketing focus, visual and audio quality, player presentation and encoded configuration. The clear winner in my mind was a case study produced by network security vendor …

I just spent a few weeks with the JVC GY-HM700U, JVC’s new shouldermount camcorder (Figure 1, right), and found myself very sorry to see it go. Its strengths include very crisp, noise-free images in a range of lighting conditions; a high-quality, easy-to-edit HD acquisition format stored on inexpensive SDHC media; a large, high-resolution LCD and viewfinder; wonderful overall usability; an …

Today, Adobe revealed Creative Suite 5 (CS5). Like many members of the press, I've been working with beta software for about three months, and I am very familiar with the additions to Premiere Pro, OnLocation, Media Encoder, and a couple of ancillary