July, 2010

• 30 July

  VP8 vs. H.264 – Quality, Encoding time, Playback CPU

  StreamingMedia just published my H.264 vs. VP8 comparison – the first to consider both encoding speed (VP8 is slow, but not that slow) and CPU playback (VP8 takes lots more than H.264 on some platforms, but there’s a big glimmer of hope). Check it out at http://www.streamingmedia.com/Articles/Editorial/Featured-Article…

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• 28 July

  Review: Telestream Wirecast

  There’s an old Hollywood joke with the punch line, “but I really want to direct.” I’m not sure what the actual joke is, or if it’s funny, but the reason I bring it up is that if you talk to writers, most would say, “but I really want to be on TV.” Certainly the web and websites such as Livestream …

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• 28 July

  Camtasia 7 Review

  Camtasia has been my go-to screen recording application on Windows since forever, and I have at least 200 Camtasia recorded projects under my belt. But seldom, if ever, have I edited and produced my project in Camtasia, preferring the more familiar environs of Adobe Premiere Pro or Apple Final Cut Pro. To be brutally honest, in previous versions, Camtasia’s editing application, Camtasia Studio, felt clunky, inefficient, and frequently dysfunctional, …

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• 28 July

  Apple Mac Pro – How Much Memory is Enough?

  In the first edition of this month’s Affordable HD enewsletter, we keep the focus on the Apple Mac Pro, specifically analyzing the optimal memory configurations for editing and encoding with Apple Final Cut Studio, Adobe Creative Suite 4, and Telestream Episode Engine. I looked at several scenarios. Figure 1. The Apple Mac Pro’s memory tray. First, I tested performance at …

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• 28 July

  Which MPEG-2 Compressor Plug-in is Best?

  I’m writing a story for Digital Content Producer on producing MPEG-2 video from HD source in Final Cut Pro/Compressor. Which plug-ins are best? – I’m trying to get Cinema Craft in, but they’re not responding to my emails. – I’ve got a trial version of Bitvise. – I’ll try Telestream Episode and Sorenson Squeeze. Are there any others that I …

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• 27 July

  Interesting Video on Creating Video Case Studies

  Just finished watching an interesting video entitled Video Case Studies – Top 10 Tips, which was produced by UK video producer Aspect Film and Video. You can watch it here, though you may need to sign in first. The top ten tips were (drumroll please): 1. Structure – have customer identify business challenge, then action you took, then beneficial results. …

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• 26 July

  VP6 Encoding Parameters of the Technology Laggards

  OK, being somewhat of a jerk here with the headline, but I’ve been pretty public in my thoughts that it’s time to transition from VP6 to H.264. Still, if you’re not ready for that move, perhaps you might want to rethink your current VP6 encoding parameters. If so, you might find this data, gleaned from multiple broadcast sites, useful. Hope …

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• 26 July

  H.264 Encoding Parameters of the Rich and Famous

  Whenever I speak in public about streaming production, I try to back up my recommendations with file parameters gathered from prominent media and corporate sites. Here are some file statistics gathered for a series of sessions that I taught this spring and summer. Information from the first slide was gathered from about 50 corporate and media sites, which I divided …

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• 20 July

  VP8 vs. H.264 vs x264 Comparisons

  As part of my First Looks review of VP8 and WebM for StreamingMedia.com, ran a bunch of VP8 and H.264 comparisons, initially using the MainConcept H.264 codec, since that’s the codec included with Sorenson Squeeze, which I used to produce the VP8 files. Then, I added some comparison files produced using the x264 codec, encoding via the QuickTime-based x264Encoder version …

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• 7 July

  Why Flash Still Plays “Critical Role” for YouTube

  From my general perspective, HTML5 has been lots of smoke with very little fire, in part because it’s not yet a complete spec that meets the needs of large scale video publisher. Though Google/YouTube has been an avid HTML5 proponent, a recent blog post from YouTube programmer John Harding identifies why YouTube won’t abandon Flash any time soon. Entitled “Flash …

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