February, 2011

• 14 February

  Flash does NOT over-consume power on Android handsets

  Colleague Tim Siglin released an extensive white paper today that assessed the affect of the Adobe Flash Player on the battery life of six Android powered devices and found that: Flash Player 10.1 , in our initial tests, has negligible battery drain impact. Wi-Fi based use of Flash Player 10.1 in the native browser, with no other applications running, appears …

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January, 2011

• 29 January

  Encoding for Upload to UGC Sites

  This is a very basic video tutorial for newbies that details how to encode for upload to UGC sites like YouTube or Vimeo. It’s published on OnlineVideo.net, and I’ve embedded their player below. Again, it’s very basic, but if you’ve been looking for help getting started in streaming video, you might find it useful. It’s produced at 1280×720, so it …

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• 25 January

  Squeeze 7 Now Available, Details at StreamingMedia.com

  I’ve been working with Sorenson Squeeze 7 for awhile now, and wanted to share my thoughts and experiences today, the day the software is officially released. If you have Squeeze 6.5 or earlier, the big question is whether you should upgrade or not, so I’ll address that first: The answer is a clear and concise “it depends.” If you’re looking …

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• 23 January

  WebM Encoding Tools: Five Popular Encoders Compared

  This is a video that I produced for OnlineVideo.net on the subject. Here’s the description. In this video evaluation, Jan Ozer looks at and evaluates five popular WebM encoders: Miro Video Encoder Firefogg Wildfrom Flix WebM Telestream Episode Pro Sorenson Squeeze 7 You’ll learn why some are quite good and others aren’t worth your time. Ozer shows video samples of each …

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• 23 January

  Posting Videos that Play on an iPad

  Here’s a video that I produced for OnlineVideo.net on the subject.  Note that it looks absolutely fabulous in full screen (if I do say so myself) so give that a shot. Enjoy!

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• 23 January

  Choosing a Premiere Pro Preset; HD Vs. SD

  I shoot pretty much exclusively in HD now, but often render to SD DVDs. When it comes to choosing a sequence preset for Premiere Pro, I have two options, native HDV, which is the format that I typically shoot in, or 720×480 widescreen to match my DVD output. Which is better? Well, the quality difference isn’t significant, but it is …

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• 14 January

  Manual vs Automatic Camera Operation

  Whenever I shoot a live performance, I have an internal debate about which functions to perform manually and which to let the camera perform. Obviously, the panning and zooming is my job; the question is whether I also take on focus and/or exposure. I shot my fifth Nutcracker season just before Christmas, which adds up to about 20 shows total, …

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• 13 January

  How to Encode To WebM

  This is an excerpt from an article I wrote for StreamingMedia. Even if you don’t believe all the hype about HTML5, sooner or later, you’ll need to start encoding some video to WebM format. Maybe for internal experimentation, for a pay-per-view or subscription project (where H.264 may incur royalties), because you’ve decided to jump into HTML5 video with both feet, …

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• 13 January

  Google Removes H.264 Codec From Chrome

  This is an excerpt from my commentary, “Welcome to the Two-Codec World,” which you can read at StreamingMedia.com. Back when Google closed on the On2 acquisition, I wrote a blog post entitled Google Closes On2 Acquisition – Better check your Wallet. The wallet reference related to the fact that Google donating VP8 to the open source cause could boost the …

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• 2 January

  New article on Producing for Adaptive Streaming at StreamingMedia.com

  An article that I wrote on producing for adaptive streaming just posted at StreamingMedia.com. The article focuses on nitty gritty encoding details, like data rates, key frame intervals and the like. To write the article, I spoke with multiple producers, including MTV, Turner Broadcasting, Harvard and the Microsoftie in charge of NBC’s Olympics and Sunday Night Football streaming video offerings. …

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