My wife owns a ballet company, which explains the frequent use of ballet sequences in my test clips and other content. Over the years, it’s been a great source of learning and training for me, though not really a business. I shoot because I have the best gear in town, which produces a great archive of my daughter’s progress and …

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 …

Real-time cloud transcoding is the future of live event streaming, and it’s here now from several companies, including Brightcove subsidiary Zencoder, which was among the first to announce a live transcoding product. In this review, I’ll

H.264 is the only compression technology that plays on all computers, mobile devices, and OTT players. This makes producing high-quality H.264 files compatible with your target playback devices an essential skill. Helping you acquire and/ or polish t

No one knows at this point, but I did learn a thing or two at Streaming Media West. By way of background, most authorities agree that there will be royalties on encoders and decoders, just like H.264. However, I was thinking that there might be royalties on free Internet content encoded with HEVC, as well. Two authorities who knew more …

This presentation was for Streaming Media Producer Live. Here’s the description.  To maximize reach and revenue, online video producers need to deliver video that plays effectively on multiple computer and mobile platforms. To accomplish this, you need to know some fundamentals about the H.264 codec, as well as the playback requirements and limitations of all target platforms. You also need …

Here’s the description; click below to download the handout. This session discusses factors to consider when choosing on- demand enterprise video encoding systems from the likes of Digital Rapids, Elemental, Harmonic, Sorenson, and Telestream. Factors incorporated into the analysis include performance, output quality, quality control options, format support, expansion options, programmability, and other variables. If you’re considering buying an enterprise …