I produce lots screencams, and some customers like having a live greenscreen video intro in front of the screencam. “What’s the harm,” they ask? It’s only 30 seconds of video, how long will that take to shoot?” Well, if you’re like me and you don’t have a dedicated studio and staff for such productions, they can take awhile. If fact, …

I recently reviewed Singular Software’s Presto for OnlineVideo.net; you can read the review here. As the lead states: Capturing and producing presentation videos typically involves multiple options, all of them bad. For example, you can frame wide and capture both the speaker and the projected slides, but then your speaker is tiny and the slides degraded. You can shoot closeup …

One of the brightest stars in the encoding universe is Fabio Sonnati, who blogs at Flash Video Technology and Optimizations. I was researching H.264 encoding parameters and revisited his site, noting that his presentation from Adobe MAX2011 entitled Encoding for Performance on Multiple Devices had just come online. You can click here to watch his 60-minute presentation, or click here …

This article is derived from a lesson in Streaming Media 101: Technical Onboarding for Streaming Media Professionals. If you’re looking for an efficient way to get up to speed on key streaming terms, technologies, workflows, and best practices, check out the course here.  Depending upon your encoding tool, you may have access to a checkbox or number box that controls …

I was noodling around in Compressor 4’s presets, and noticed the presets for HTTP Live Streaming. “HMMM,” I thought, “I wonder if Apple chunks the files and creates the required manifest files?” (Didn’t in my tests). Then I pondered, “I wonder if Apple’s presets match their recommendations in Technical Note TN2224?” So, I opened all the presets, recorded their encoding …

Few things in life are more fun than playing with the latest, greatest notebook computer. For the last few months, I’ve had the pleasure of working with HP’s EliteBook 8760w, which is the most powerful notebook I’ve ever tested. It’s a highly potent combination of Intel i7 CPU, NVIDIA 5010M GPU and an appropriately named DreamColor display. You can read …

Sometimes I get so caught up in Flash video that I forget that Flash does many other things, from serving as the environment for the WeVideo editor to enabling sites like the Economist to present interactive data relating to the upcoming presidential election. If you visit the Economist, you can click each state to see the latest poll figures for …

…is NOT how they encode their video. But, they do a lot of other things right with their streaming video. GoDaddy.com aggressively advertises videos on television to convince you to visit their web site. With celebrities Danica Patrick and Jillian Michaels on board, it’s a pretty good strategy. Of course, when most viewers see these TV commercials, they probably wonder …

DASH stands for Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP, and it’s MPEG spec that was unanimously ratified on December 2, 2011. What is DASH? As I open in my article What is MPEG DASH for Streaming Media Magazine: MPEG DASH (Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP) is a developing ISO Standard (ISO/IEC 23009-1) that should be finalized by early 2012. As the …

Here’s the introduction. The referenced video on YouTube details the 28 hours I spent in Manhattan with my girlies last September, including our visit to the Empire State Building, Times Square and the Today Show, plus a clip of my daughter subway surfing. “While the desktop video editing market has consolidated into the big four (Adobe, Apple, Avid, and Sony), …