Video and the Internet

Scoble has been talking about video on the Internet lately, which got me thinking a bit in a retrospective manner. Long before I became a code monkey and author, I was a broadcast monkey. I was one of those rare types that did it all, from air talent to engineering.

When I made the professional transition around 1999, broadcast video was really just starting to make a widespread conversion into the digital world, and even then that was only with regards to acquisition. Sony had its DVCAM and Panasonic had its DVCPRO (what I used in my facility), and consumer miniDV was catching on, if a bit on the expensive side. DV-based video editing more or less sucked, because the only thing any normal people could afford was Adobe's horrible Premier. To really get things done, you needed something from Avid or Media 100.

Today I use Avid's Xpress Pro HD, which is a fabulous product that shares the same interface as the stuff used right up to feature films. They're stubborn about hardware compatibility, but really no one can touch what they have. It's hard to believe a software-only solution is really this good. Ditto for Apple's Final Cut Pro, which I haven't done anything more than play with but it certainly seems really solid.

Figuring in the Internet has always been an interesting process. Video distributed over the Internet is still of marginal quality (in my broadcast eye), and because of all of the compression, you can't edit or remaster it without killing the quality. Anything under native DV isn't usable for further production.

Of the various formats out there, Windows Media is OK for talking heads, Real blows if for no other reason than the player is a bloated piece of crap, and QuickTime, in my experience, still gives you the best bang for the buck. You can do simple HTTP streaming with it, and the Sorenson codec is still at the top of the heap. There's a reason most movie trailers are released in this format. People pay me money to encode video, and I always get them the best quality in QT with Sorenson.

Broadband penetration sure has made things easier. You can do really nice stuff on the Internet at a resolution that can actually be seen as something more than a low-resolution slide show. Thank God that old modems are becoming more rare with each passing year. Access and bandwidth are probably still the biggest limitations to distribution of video, but I'm encouraged by lower pricing for the connections and computer hardware. We've still got a long way to go.

4 Comments

  • Yup, we do have a long way to go.



    I disagree that all you can do is talking head videos on the Internet, though. People like the videos I've been doing for Channel 9, for instance. http://channel9.msdn.com

  • No... I said that Windows Media as a compression format was only good (for my tastes) for talking heads. It just falls apart a bit with fast motion unless you really crank up the bit rate. It also has some weird defaults regarding black levels that doesn't jive with nearly every other format.

  • You should really give Windows Media 9 another try. The quality has gotten really good. We encode all our movies in Windows Media format and get near DVD quality at 620 Kbps (http://www.masaladownloads.com).



    Considering that a ton of users have over 512Kbps connections these days, you can watch 620 Kbps within a minute in most cases.



    -Imran

  • That's just too high of a bit rate. Bandwidth is cheap, but it's still not free. I can squeeze out near-DVD quality at a decent resolution under 300k in Sorenson/QT.

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