Lesson of the Week: More Efficient Chart Title Creation in Excel

I just finished one consulting project that involved testing 22 clips with three codecs to produce nine rate-distortion charts per clip (1080p, 720p, 480p for VMAF, SSIM, and PSNR) and am working another with 35 clips with 4 RD charts each with two encoding modes. So efficient chart creation in Excel is now a huge priority.

One frustration with Excel is that if you create your titles directly in a chart they don’t update with search and replace. Changing four chart titles by hand 35 times is time-consuming, error-prone, and frustrating. So, I spent some time on Google and learned that if you link a title to a cell, it will update with search and replace, and so will the title. I’m sure many readers know this, but I’ve been working with Excel since it came out in 1985 and I didn’t.

If you’re like me, here’s a very short video explaining the three-step process.

I’ve added it to my course on Computing and Using Video Quality Metrics. It’s a great way to learn how to compute video metrics like VMAF, SSIM, and PSNR, and how to create rate-distortion curves and compute BD-Rate functions.



About Jan Ozer

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I help companies train new technical hires in streaming media-related positions; I also help companies optimize their codec selections and encoding stacks and evaluate new encoders and codecs. I am a contributing editor to Streaming Media Magazine, writing about codecs and encoding tools. I have written multiple authoritative books on video encoding, including Video Encoding by the Numbers: Eliminate the Guesswork from your Streaming Video (https://amzn.to/3kV6R1j) and Learn to Produce Video with FFmpeg: In Thirty Minutes or Less (https://amzn.to/3ZJih7e). I have multiple courses relating to streaming media production, all available at https://bit.ly/slc_courses. I currently work as www.netint.com as a Senior Director in Marketing.

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