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Without question, lighting is the single most important determinant of streaming quality. Shoot a well lit scene with a consumer camcorder, or a poorly lit scene with the latest HD wonder with 2/3” CCDs, and the consumer camcorder wi

how to limit motion during shooting and editing to improve streaming quality

This video presents the new features in Apple Compressor 3.5, including new templates, enhanced Droplets, Job Actions and the ability to auto-detect settings from files dragged into the settings window.

Earlier this week, I posted a column relating to Silverlight observations made while teaching a seminar at Stanford. My colleague, Stefan Richter, posted a snippet of the column on his site, www.flashcomguru.com, a premiere learning site for Flash de

I produce a lot of screencams and other narration-type recordings, and workstation noise is a constant concern. I also have multiple computers around my office, most off testing some software program or rendering some project. While “cacophony” is definitely too strong a word to apply, less noise is always good. For this reason, I was excited when HP called to …

Apple recently released Final Cut Pro 7 and I was fortunate enough to have an advance copy, from which I've produced the feature overview screencam that you'll see if you click this link. For more information on Final Cut Studio, you can read my f

By now you know that Apple has launched an update to Final Cut Studio. I got an early look last week. The new version will cost $999, a reduction in price of $300. If you own any previous version of Final Cut Pro—even version 1, insisted the product manager in our meeting—you can upgrade to the new Final Cut Studio …

All’s been quite on the Streaming Learning Center front as I spent the last week teaching several courses on streaming media production and encoding at the lovely Stanford Campus at Palo Alto. Other than a quick sneak peak at the ne

For VP6 and H.264 encoding, Telestream’s Episode Engine is fast and produces equal or better quality than most other streaming encoders. For those producing shiny optical discs, MPEG-2 performance and quality is also quite good. However, Win

Apple released the new Final Cut Studio today; what’s in it for streaming producers? Some nice workflow improvements, especially for producers of short-form content; for producers of long-form content, though, objects in the mirror may not be as close as they appear. More on that below. In terms of more mainstream uses, the big news includes Blu-ray output from within …