Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
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We charge the same as we would charge for a dub. If we do 8 different encodes and FTP uploads, we charge for 8 of them. We initially got complaints (a lot of complaints) from clients, until we explained the procedure, which as Todd points out, is more time-consuming and complex than just making good old fashioned dubs.
Almost all of our commercial delivery is digital now, all via FTP. There’s only one station we still make dubs for out of probably 30-40 stations we deliver to in a 200 mile radius.
There are some buys where we have to make literally 4 or 5 totally different encodes for a spot, because each station or cable system has different requirements. They either need different formats/codecs, with MPEG2 and H264 Quicktime being the most prevalent. But some stations want bars/tone and slate, some don’t. Some require the file be exactly 30 seconds, not a frame longer. Some require ONLY slate, with no bars. It’s a pain. If we have a campaign we’re sending out, say 4 spots, we might have to encode each spot 4 or 5 different ways. That’s 20 encoding passes, then the time to upload on our T1 line, which can take several hours for 20 spots.
We’ve actually brought a couple clients in to show them what has to be done. When we did dubs, we could make 3 BetaSP copies at a time, so we could dub, check and label a 4 spot campaign (all on the same tape) in less than 30 minutes. Encoding that same spot and uploading via FTP takes at least twice as long, then uses resources on 3 or 4 computers for another hour (and our slows our internet to a crawl).
I actually think we make very little from doing this considering the time it takes. Not to mention the issues of then troubleshooting with the stations/cable systems who can never seem to find the spots, despite the fact THEY’VE setup where they go on their servers. They go to the same place every time and we invariably get half a dozen calls every time we upload from reps asking, “where’s the spot?” We say, “same place it was last time you asked.”
Then there’s the issue of the stations/cable operators taking your high-quality digital file and re-encoding it. Never mind it’s in a format that can be loaded and played directly from their playout server. When they re-encode, several of the stations reverse the fields on the spots, so they look even worse because not only are they re-compressed at 10:1 or higher, but now the motion jumps and stutters. This happens because most of the encoding systems are automated. People are not involved. We’ve talked to stations and they admit it. NOBODY looks at the spots before they hit the air. The file is uploaded. After a certain amount of time, it’s automatically moved to the encoder, re-encoded and then automatically placed on their server. Once there, it’s assigned for air. It’s not checked, it’s not viewed. They look at the ISCI code the file is given in the file name and that’s it.
We joke that it’s a miracle they get to air at all. And then there’s the whold SD, HD issues. But that’s for another rant!
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
With H264, I don’t believe you need the specific brand or flavor of codec to play the file. I believe the specs for the codec are such that if you have a media player that can play H264, most if not all the various H264 iterations will play.
I know we’ve had zero problems sending out H264 files using a wide variety of codecs, from x264, to Main Concept, to Apple’s to Sony’s coming out of Vegas.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
I thought the transparency/composition trick only worked using the .mov container. Could be wrong on that. I think the best solution is to avoide the Apple H264 codec and use x264 or Main Concept’s if you have it as part of an encoding app.
Another trick that allegedly works on Quicktime for Windows is the following, pulled from Video Copilot’s blog.
It’s dubbed the “tiff trick” by users:
1) Create a small (32×32 pixels or so) tiff or bitmap – dosent matter what color, just make it 8bit and RGB
2) Open a new player and ‘Open image sequence’ and select the tiff/bitmap. set the frame rate to whatever you’re going to be working in
3) Open your desired quicktime in another player, ’select-all’ and ‘copy’ the clip
4) Back in you ‘tiff/bitmap’ movie hit ‘add to movie’ – this will add the video over the top of the tiff/bitmap on a second video layer
5) Export using your desired codecThis is supposed to match the original better than the transparency/blend/composition trick and works using the mp4 container.
I’ve never tried it because we typically use either Main Concept or x264 and just avoid the issue altogether. We do have a couple of TV stations that require Apple H264 for commercial uploads, and we correct the video in an initial encoding pass to uncompressed AVI before taking the AVI into Quicktime Pro for Windows to do the H264. We simply tested color bars using that process a few times and then imported those back into our editing app to check them on a hardware waveform/vectorscope in real-time until we got them correct.
The transparency/blend trick seems to be spotty in terms of actually working. Some people say it works, others say it only slightly improves the gamma shift issue.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
One potential drawback to H264 is a lot of Windows users don’t have native video players to play it. If they have Vista and below, unless they download a 3rd party media player (like VLC), they won’t be able to play the file.
One potential solution is to create a simple HTML page with a flash player to play that H264 file. That would allow all Windows users to play it, as well as Mac and even Linux. They just open the HTML page in their browser and play the video.
We created a CD like that for a client and made the HTML page autorun when the CD was inserted into any computer. There are freebie utilities that are pretty easy to use to do it. You could even make the HTML page have two simple links, one to play the muusic from the CD using the users’s default media player, and another link to load and play the video from the flash player on a 2nd HTML page.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
When you create DVD files inside a VIDEO_TS folder, the video and audio is muxed together for you into a file with a .vob extension. You don’t have to burn those to DVD. You can open that folder inside DVD player software and it will play it just like it’s a DVD.
With that said, perhaps their kiosk requires an MPEG2 program stream file. Which also shouldn’t be a problem and in terms of compression is identical to the .vob file inside of a VIDEO_TS folder. When you author a DVD, if the MPEG2 elementary streams (separate audio and video files) are compliant, no re-compression occurs, they’re just multiplexed (video & audio combined) into the .vob program stream.
And…you can author an MPEG2 program stream (with both audio/video) from virtually any encoding application, using DVD compliant settings. Just about evey encoding app I’ve used has a preset to make those somewhere, and even if they don’t, they usually will have a drop-down to create a program stream.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
I don’t have a direct answer to your technical question, but we do menu design along with producing videos for interactive kiosks, and all of them have used either standard MPEG2 video or standard DVD video inside VIDEO_TS folders. They scale fine on the screens and look remarkably good. One is a touch screen information system that displays information and videos on a 2nd 42″ LCD screen, with the menus appearing on a 19″ touch screen across the room. We were concerned about how the SD videos would look scaled on the 42″ LCD…and to our surprise, they look great.
We also don’t compress them down as much as you’re talking about, as an interactive system typically needs a fairly powerful PC to run properly, including it’s display card, which typically will have hardware video decoding on-board. So we usually compress using standard DVD compression rates between 5-8MB/sec, and they’ve all played just fine. The one that uses the large screen has a $2000 dual-monitor graphic card with all sorts of hardware decoding and additional software to help with scaling etc.
Anyway…you might try a standard DVD compliant MPEG2 file and see how it works before jumping through more hoops testing.
I’m not sure why they’d need video compressed to 1MB/sec. That’s a lot of compression and it won’t look very good even using MPEG2. And the computer would have to be ancient to not be able to playback DVD compliant video. I have a 10 year old PC at work that can play DVD videos fine from a DVD-ROM or direct from disk.
The interactive displays we’ve worked on have all been programmed using Adobe Director, which supports a few video formats, but using DVD authored files seems to be the easiest way to program them so they’ll scale properly to fit a kiosk display (at least that’s what the programmers all tell us).
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
I can add that if you hire electrical contractors to do electrical work, NONE of them agree on what’s considered “up to code.” You’ll get conflicting and contradictory recommendations from every single one of them.
I think it’s like any set of rules and regulations, people remember what they want to remember or they go by rules they learned 10 years ago. People also misunderstand and misinterpret stuff like this as well. But like Bob said, sounds like a crock to me to run ethernet cabling.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
I don’t know about new buildings, but when we bought our building we had lots of cabling run under floors (there’s a basement underneath) and up through walls, with lots of wall plates and such installed. An IT company did for us but they didn’t need a license. Likewise, we just re-did our conference room and ran some A/V and ethernet cabling through the walls and under the floor, with it all terminating to nice wall and floor plates. Again…no licenses needed here in Indiana.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
Bits on the Run is worth checking out. They do the compression for you (after you upload a high-quality file), set up your players, provide the code to put it in your website etc. And compared to other video hosting services they’re dirt cheap. You also set up a free account and test it to see if you like it.
I’ve also heard good things about Sorenson 360, and they’ve set their up to provide mobile versions so that’s taken care of within the various packages. It’s also quite affordable and again, they do the compression…you just upload a high-quality file.
https://www.sorensonmedia.com/video-delivery-network/
I’m sure there are others, but these two are doing things many of the big video hosting services are not, and they’re charging less than the big boys.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
Well I was talking about video capture hardware, not your computer’s graphic display. So if you’re on a laptop, you’re likely software input/output only.
For the HD resolution, Cineform is the best to output to as it’s great quality (compressed but still looks amazing), and should play back in real-time. I’m not sure if AE will find and use the Vegas installed Cineform codec though, so another option if it can’t render to that is to render uncompressed, then setup your Vegas timeline using Cineform and just render to that inside in Vegas.
On the smaller size, you could probably go uncompressed and be fine since it’s a small pixel resolution.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog