Blogs

Like most compression geeks, I’m a big fan of the x264 codec, which is widely considered the highest quality H.264 codec, winning the prestigious University of Moscow codec shootout year after year. Though the codec has a comprehensive range of configuration options, I recommend that most users simply choose a preset and let it go at that-no tinkering required (as …

No, it’s not one of my webinars, it’s from Unbounce, a company that helps marketers create landing pages for products, sevices and the like. Two things are cool about this webinar. First, if you’re a video producer, you have to be excited about ways video can help your company market your products and services. Second, they practice what they preach, …

When YouTube sneezes, the codec world catches the ‘flu, even if the cause of the sneeze was totally innocuous. So it was with YouTube’s announcement that they will show 4K video encoded with VP9 at CES with hardware partners including Sony, Intel and many others. From the coverage in the press, which extended all the way to CNN, you would …

Compressor 4.1 is the first major update to Compressor since well before Final Cut Pro X. I reviewed the software for Streaming Media Magazine, and found a great new interface, the same old plumbing and confusing operation; here’s the pithy close: To close, let me say that 95% of Compressor users likely encode at data rates high enough to eliminate …

On January 6, 2014, HP announced a new version of their Z1 all-in-one workstation. I love the first version because it’s beautiful, powerful and field upgradeable; but it lacked high-speed external connectivity, so your capture options for live production were limited. You can see my experience with the unit here and my colleague Tim Siglin’s review of the Z1 here. …

One area of interest for me in 2014 is video search engine optimization (SEO). In this regard, I’ll be perusing a number of resources like webinars and articles to learn the basics. I figure as long as I’m learning, I might as well share this information with visitors to the Streaming Learning Center; after all, if you care about video, …

I’m not a big fan of Quora, but occasionally the questions and answers are relevant. I saw this one today: Question: I want to gain hireable, professional-level experience and perhaps work in documentary filmmaking one day. Here’s a portion of the response from Chris Keath, Broadcast Engineer: Well, FCP 7 is still extremely common, but FCP X is not common …

Looking for Adobe Encore on the Creative Cloud? It’s not easy to find. Here’s an intro to a story that I wrote for Streaming Media Producer about Encore’s demise, and how to find it on the Creative Cloud. So, there I was, starting to run some tests on a brand new HP Z820 with 12/24 core E5-2697 v2 CPUs, one …

YouTube Live is a very useable and useful live streaming service that formerly was only open to a limited number of producers. According to StreamingMedia.com, the service is now free and open to all. I reviewed the service in an article you can read here; here’s one of the two webinars that I produced with the service as part of …

My review of the Brightcove Video Cloud Live service is up and running on StreamingMedia.com. Basically, I reviewed the service so I could work with the Zencoder Live Transcoding service, which worked flawlessly; it’s a really nice service. The service Brightcove built around the service was functional, but had some flaws and rough edges which you can read about in …