Learning

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Beginners’ Guide to Adaptive Bitrate Streaming

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Lesson of the Week: What’s the Optimal Data Rate for Mezzanine Files?

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Sourcebook 2021 Tutorials Focus Video and Course Production

Every year, the Streaming Media Sourcebook features tutorials to help streaming media professionals perform their daily tasks faster and better and buyer’s guides to help them purchase the right gear and software. This year I focused my articles on video production topics. Here are the tutorials with a brief description: Connecting a DSLR or Camcorder to an External Mic – …

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My Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Week of Virtual Presenting

So, here I am, just about to launch a course on webinars and live video production (now launched), and I experience the worst two virtual presentations ever. In this blog, I’ll share the gory details and let you know how you (perhaps) can avoid the same fate. All that said, this is more a writer’s self-therapy for me than learning …

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Webinar: Video Codecs in 2021 and Beyond with Jan Ozer

I was honored to present a free webinar entitled Video Codecs in 2021 and Beyond with Muvi on April 8, 2021. The slides and recording are below. Here’s the description. There has never been a time where so many video codecs were available (or soon to be available) for video producers. From MPEG, we have AVC (H.264), HEVC (H.265), VVC …

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How to Reduce Encoding Time by Up to 40% With Negligible Quality Loss

Reducing the reference frame setting from 16 to 1 when using x.264’s veryslow preset decreased encoding time by 46% on ten 2-minute test files while dropping the average VMAF score from 96.06 to 95.97, a decrease of less than .001. If you used the Medium preset, at the default setting of 3 reference frames, changing to ref=1 would drop encoding …

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Lesson of the Week: Two Data Points for Producing Effective Webinars (and a Free Download)

As the producer of webinars and virtual training events for Streaming Media Magazine and Streaming Learning Center, I’m always interested in information that helps me produce more effective events. A recent report from Bluejeans, the Verizon-owned video conference provider, provided several interesting data points. By way of background, the report discussed survey data collected by IDG from 200 respondents in a …

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Webinar: H.264 Encoding for Newbies and Optimizers

The webinar is over; thanks to all who registered and attended. You can watch the recorded version below. The handout is available here. Description: This free webinar teaches streaming media novices how to produce high-quality H.264 output delivered via efficient encoding ladders that optimize quality, compatibility, and bitrate efficiency. The webinar will also introduce the concept of per-title encoding and …

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Lesson of the Week: Per-Title Encoding in 6.2 Dimensions

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Engineer and IT Professional Recommend Streaming Media 101

Happy to share two new five-star reviews for Streaming Media 101, the only online training course available for onboarding new streaming media professionals, whether coming from the IT discipline or via engineering. Engineer Chris Joyce commented, As an engineer, I wasn’t sure what to expect and didn’t want to pay for some fluffy sales-type material. Jan’s course didn’t disappoint as he …

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