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For those who are still Fishing…..
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Herb and David, note that there are already companies selling VPN access to insanely fat pipes with acres of storage at the other end. One of those is Prime Focus, reselling a broadcast news-oriented service that they created for their VFX and spots clients. They posted a press release about it in the COW yesterday.
Not at all intended to replace local storage, but services like this are a way to get around the throttling too common in the US that shows no signs of going away. Even if Moore’s Law applied to bandwidth, Moore probably wasn’t using DSL or a cable modem from his local telco.
Prime Focus’s pricing is more for corporate customers (BIG corporate customers), but I would expect to see solutions that scale down in the very near future.
In the meantime, many solutions are already available that are working fine.
My thanks also for the x264 tip, David!
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[Tim Wilson] “Not at all intended to replace local storage, but services like this are a way to get around the throttling too common in the US that shows no signs of going away. Even if Moore’s Law applied to bandwidth, Moore probably wasn’t using DSL or a cable modem from his local telco.
Prime Focus’s pricing is more for corporate customers (BIG corporate customers), but I would expect to see solutions that scale down in the very near future.”
Ah, fasp transport! I use it all the time through Aspera, which I believe Prime Focus uses as well. Definitely faster.
Last year’s SMPTE conference focused a lot on the virtues as well as the limitations of the cloud. In fact, cloud and 3d were the buzzwords, and the lion’s share of the technical presentations were on these two subjects.
Anyone truly interested, in mass storage cloud issues can find a wealth of relevant papers in SMPTE’s on line library.
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David –
Do you use the standard settings or presets with x264 or do you have your own tunings, and if so would you care to share?
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
Herb –
Happy to share. Will post all settings and workflow when I get a minute later this afternoon.
_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl -
Great. Appreciate it.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
David,
First and foremost, thank you very much for helping elevate this forum from the “piss and moan” state of the past few months – back toward useful, practical knowledge. For a while I literally had to just keep away because the environment here was so emotionally toxic. Hopefully, we’re returning to civility – and I appreciate your thoughts that appear to move us even more in that direction.
Plus, your link to X-264 is precisely the practical help that make time spent contributing here valuable.
I just wish the search for better tools could move even more rapidly.
I spent the early part of this week in another fancy hotel ballroom shooting conference coverage for a massive, global accounting firm – and I had to blow the dust off my SD gear because their live webcasts required SD Flash feeds.
It was so interesting to walk into the same kind of environment where I’ve been shooting for decades and see all the expected fly packs and recording tools replaced by 3 cheap PC laptops doing flash encoding and live feed via IP.
Yes, the delivered quality was abysmal – but the convenience of allowing 100,000 employees world wide to access the content in real-time trumps everything.
Those are the kind of forces shaping our world today. “Now” trumps “good.” Information relevance and freshness trumps the presentation quality of it’s delivery. Hopefully, those of us who care about quality can bring some of it back to the stream – and knowing about each incremental improvement – such as X-264 will help us accomplish that.
I do worry about compatibility, tho. Does the compression in the X-264 variant allow for good transportability? Will my large company corporate clients be able to parse and view it without VLC like tools? (Something I seldom can get by their IT departments since it represents something they not only don’t understand – but see as a “threat” since it represents data streams coming into their i-nets from an outside source.)
I’m definitely going to play with it – because I love anything that can maintain higher quality at reduced bandwidth. But so much of the world is so backwards (like those awful FLASH requirments for my corporate clients this past weekend) that I’m concerned that what I want – isn’t the same as what they need.
(sound familiar?)
Anyway, again, my personal thanks for both your tone and contribution.
Bill.
“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor
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Bill –
I’m jumping in here but x264 files act just like h.264 files in terms of playback. Nothing new is needed.
Herb Sevush
Zebra Productions -
[Bill Davis] “I spent the early part of this week in another fancy hotel ballroom shooting conference coverage for a massive, global accounting firm – and I had to blow the dust off my SD gear because their live webcasts required SD Flash feeds.
It was so interesting to walk into the same kind of environment where I’ve been shooting for decades and see all the expected fly packs and recording tools replaced by 3 cheap PC laptops doing flash encoding and live feed via IP.
Yes, the delivered quality was abysmal – but the convenience of allowing 100,000 employees world wide to access the content in real-time trumps everything.”
I have much to say about the above as I am deeply involved with live streaming.
HD streaming (above SD frame sizes) is still not common given the upstream bandwidth, the downstream viewer bandwidth, the amount of data that needs to be pushed.
But sources certainly don’t have to be SD. Certainly DV firewire is fine though.
A good video card can downrez HD to SD so the Computer CPU load is kept reasonable.
Given a certain frame size and data rate restrictions, stream quality can be very good when you keep “bits per pixel” in mind.
Recording quality can be well beyond stream quality. When I stream Flash I’m often recording Apple ProRes LT (on Macs of course).
One thing Macs now have going for them is Thunderbolt. Blackmagic, Matrox, AJA are all coming out with live input boxes that can handle HDMI as well as HD-SDI, Blackmagic Intensity Extreme being the least expensive at $299. Imagine that can even work with 13″ MacBookPro and one might even find MacBookAir adequate if one doesn’t stress the CPU.
As someone who does streaming, the biggest obstacles have been camera input given the decline of firewire and the advent of inexpensive HDMI cameras. As noted the above boxes allow for amazing portability now.
The problem I see so far is that none of the Thunderbolt Video I/O boxes have Thudnerbolt pass through. They all seem to be end of chain devices. Once pass through boxes appear on the market it may be possible to do live, software switched and streamed, multicamera shoots with a laptop and Thunderbolt passthrough for a high quality recording.
BTW with devices like Teradek Cube, one can even send the camera wirelessly back to the laptop to use in a live stream. Multiple wireless cameras is possible depending on the conditions.
One crinkle in the post workflow on live streams is that the recording might have a slightly variable frame rate. While the file would playback fine in a player, FCP7 would force it to a video frame rate, throwing the audio out of sync.
So far, in my tests, this doesn’t happen in FCPX. It seems to handle the slight variation in frame rate without issue.
Another thing is sometimes the only recording you have might be an H.264 .mp4 file. I recently had just such job. The on location camera recording failed so the only viable recording was the server based file archive of the stream. I imported that into FCPX, didn’t even do any background encoding to ProRes. I was able to edit the H.264 .mp4 (with its variable frame rate) in real time with no background rendering (cuts only). When I finished I exported the 35 minute piece in ProRes in just a few minutes. I used the MXO2 with MAX to do a faster than real time encode and FTP that back to the client.
In short, FCPX really shines in this kind of worfklow.
[Bill Davis] “Does the compression in the X-264 variant allow for good transportability? Will my large company corporate clients be able to parse and view it without VLC like tools?”
Depending on the settings, I’ve seen some x264 compatibility settings. Using the presets help minimize this but there are some issues. It’s best to test first. x264 quality can be very good. It works in Compressor as a Quicktime Component and is leagues better than Apple’s H.264 which is one of the “weakest” I’ve seen (quality issue when you need to use aggressively low data rates and limited control over settings that can improve quality).
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Bill,
My pleasure, and thank you for the acknowledgment. I think the recent name change for this forum was a smart way to re-frame and provide a platform for healthy debate. It would be pretty boring if we agreed on everything all the time! I enjoy the push back from the smart people here because even when I disagree, it forces me to research, reexamine, and sharpen my own arguments. And hopefully we all learn in the process. I certainly am. Like this morning with @Tim Wilson’s post on Prime Focus – interesting stuff, Tim!
Re: x264 compatibility – Like Herb said, not a problem, it’s simply an open-source variant of h264 with all tuning parameters fully exposed. 100% compatible as long as you don’t tweak the wrong things if you don’t know what you’re doing. There’s a large community of enthusiasts that get deep into the innards and share results. I keep it simple and don’t go there. Just a couple internal settings to be aware of and the right general settings will seriously up your encoding game.
I actually use a multi-step process that includes a mastering stage with another tool before I encode. It’ll take a bit longer, but I’ll write up my entire delivery workflow with some screen grabs so everyone can check it out.
_______________________
David Lawrence
art~media~design~research
propaganda.com
publicmattersgroup.com
facebook.com/dlawrence
twitter.com/dhl -
[Craig Seeman] “The problem I see so far is that none of the Thunderbolt Video I/O boxes have Thudnerbolt pass through. “
Hey Craig, AJA ioXT passes through: https://www.aja.com/products/io/io-xt.php
To me, web streaming is in it’s composite video days. Bandwidth is the major limit, otherwise the technology is pretty much there, wouldn’t you agree?
And what’s that you say? FCPX does something better than FCP7? Blaspheme.
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