Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
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IT people in general are clueless about streaming video across networks and the internet. We deal with this constantly. What generally happens is we deliver web or network ready compressed files and they end up getting recompressed by somebody to a different size, codec and data rate, and if it’s 16×9 it usually gets resized to 4×3 (or vice versa)…. even though we’ve given them what everyone agreed upon.
It’s incredibly frustrating and quite amazing considering how pervasive video is online. That said, streaming video can also be incredibly complex and in the corporate world, the end-users hardware and software configurations can vary wildly. We’ve encountered situations where the client loudly complained that the videos we sent don’t have sound…only to find out days (and hours of troubleshooting) later…that none of the workstations in the company have sound cards.
Or on another occasion, deliver a client requested Quicktime movie and again get complaints that no-one except for the Marketing Department could play it (see where this is going?). I figured this one out quickly. The marketing department was all Mac…the rest of the corporation was PC…and weren’t allowed to install third party video players (i.e. Quicktime)…so they couldn’t play the .mov file.
I could go on for days….but the only solution is to give them choices and give them several versions and make your recommendations…then let them decide what works and doesn’t work. Oh yeah…charge accordingly!
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
We have 4TB or storage. Apace spent several hours in phone conferences and using “Go To Meeting” to help us select our hardware setup and then help us with the software install.
We hired a local IT guy to do the actual network installation, but only because I was busy with other work. If you have a working knowledge of networking, it’s not very difficult to set that part up yourself. But Apace will provide loads consultation help getting it installed as part of the purchase. They probably spent an hour in phone conferences (along with our reseller IEEE in California) helping us make choices on how to configure and cable things, recommend what switch to buy etc.
Then spent another 3-4 hours (over 2 separate days) controlling our workstations setting up the software side of it for us and connecting and testing the 4 workstations.
The vStor unit we bought cost $8900, but once we added a spare drive, a 48 port managed GB switch, some new cabling, 2 LaCie rackmount network backup drive (4TB) a LaCie rackmount network project drive (2TB), a rolling rack, sound proofing material for the closet it’s housed in (the vStor is WELL cooled and is hence loud)…and paid the local IT company for about a day’s worth of installing all that…we spent about $15,000. It’s been running non-stop since the install in Jan-Feb 2008 without a single hiccup or technical issue. It’s been off 3 times…all for power outages since.
Hope that helps.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
MP4 is the typical format of H.264, although it can also be contained in MPEG2, AVI, MOV and others.
H.264 is designed as a delivery format, so you’re basically heavily compressing your VHS (which is the lowest quality known to man to begin with); then recompressing going to MPEG2. Additionally, you’re viewing it on a big 42″ LCD that’s likely HD, which means it’s then blowing up your 720×480 video to something like 1280×720 (or thereabouts). So it’s not surprising it looks pixelated. The best you can do is eliminate the first step and digitize the VHS directly to MPEG2. That will elminate one compression step, but it will still probably look pretty bad on a 42″ HDTV.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
We use an Apace vStor system and it works great. It’s been running for almost 3 years now and has been off 3 times…all during power outages. It’s never hiccuped, never had any file corruption, and best of all, we get 3 to 4 real-time channels of DVCPro50 SD video across 3 edit stations simultaneously. It can also do compressed HD (DVCPro100 or Cineform) without issue, but fewer channels. You can add drive arrays and inscrease your real-time performance and stream counts.
Their customer service is the best I’ve ever experienced and while we’re a PC based shop….all the clients they had me talk to before we bought were Final Cut based shops…so it works happily with Mac and in fact, will work in a mixed editing shop since it’s OS agnostic. It’s formatting doesn’t give a hoot about the workstation’s OS.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
We use an Apace vStor system and it works great. It’s been running for almost 3 years now and has been off 3 times…all during power outages. It’s never hiccuped, never had any file corruption, and best of all, we get 3 to 4 real-time channels of DVCPro50 SD video across 3 edit stations simultaneously. It can also do compressed HD (DVCPro100 or Cineform) without issue, but fewer channels. You can add drive arrays and inscrease your real-time performance and stream counts.
Their customer service is the best I’ve ever experienced and while we’re a PC based shop….all the clients they had me talk to before we bought were Final Cut based shops…so it works happily with Mac and in fact, will work in a mixed editing shop since it’s OS agnostic. It’s formatting doesn’t give a hoot about the workstation’s OS.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
Wow…I didn’t realize my rant would create such a stir! I will say that as a company we’re going on our 15th year in business, so we’re not new to any of this and have seen our share of change in that time.
I am personally going on my 26th year in this business, and have produced and directed work that ranges from six-figure, grant supported PBS documentaries to $1500 yell and sell car commercials. Much like Bob, I also constantly try to learn new equipment, new software and try new ideas. We’ve been using ethernet based shared storage in our facility for 3 years and like Walter, didn’t realize it was even possible until I started exploring and hanging around the SAN forum a few years back. I’ve tried (unsuccessfully) to implement ethernet based deck control in our facility. We know it’s possible because Harris already uses it in a couple of their ingest systems.
The point here is that we ARE the type of company that tries new things and constantly looks for and explores new markets. We began as a video production company and are now a full-service ad agency. Just this year we began offering web design when before we farmed it out. We were sending TV spots encoded to MPEG2 using FTP back in 2001! We were sending radio spots first via satellite, then using DG, then using email… when other companies were still sending CDs in the mail. So we ARE progressive company both technologically and idealogically…yet.. we continue to struggle with what is easily the largest change we’ve seen. Just last week an ad agency here in our town, Keller-Crescent fired all their employees and were bought by their president. They changed their name to 10 over 12 (don’t ask) and are trying to survive as a “boutique type agency.” This is an agency that for 50 years was a top 100 agency in sales. They had many fortune 500 clients. But in less than a decade, they’re gone!
Were they slow to change? Yes. Were they arrogant as all get out? Yes. Were they expensive? Yes. Were they good? Yes…VERY!
My point isn’t so much that budgets are small or that people are inexperienced and green. It’s that people don’t seem to recognize what quality is and worse, even if they do, they don’t want to pay for it. They’re happy with mediocrity (at least in our region). Clients don’t even want to meet to discuss “ideas” or concepts. They just want their project shot. They have no desire to tell stories or “hook” people with clever visuals. Even when they have decent budgets they show up at the shoot without a script…heck…without a shot list….despite our repeated attempts to meet and discuss and even offers to write their script for them. This trend has definitely escalated…and that’s more what shocks me. Showing up for a shoot that IS expensive with no plan, heck…no idea of what they’re trying to accomplish is the norm instead of the exception!
It reminds me of when I was in college and the “video club” would meet on Saturdays and everyone would show up to the studio but nobody had a script or any ideas. They thought video would just “happen.” THIS is what many of the projects we’ve been working on lately are like. This is what is incredulous to me. And beleieve me…we try very hard to convince clients of the importance of ideas and story and uniuque visuals and sound.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
960×720 is quite big for web video and while it will play on some end-users computers, there will be many more that it will simply NOT play on smoothly at that size.
As an example, I’m typing this on a 4 year old Gateway laptop, and Vimeo, YouTube and Hulu HD videos will not play without constant stuttering or buffering on my computer…and it’s well maintained, is very fast for it’s age, and I have a 20Mb/sec internet connection.
There’s no real “trick” to what Vimeo is doing. If you use a decent encoding program (Handbrake is free and very good), you can get your data rates as low as 750Kb/sec and still get very good looking video using H.264. At that data rate, a 1 minute video would come in at about 6MB. You could go as high as 1000Kb/sec and get good results. But it will look much cleaner if you go a little smaller on the pixel size…say to 720×540. Also…if there is audio, you can go as low as 64Kb/sec and it will sound fine. Use a bitrate caluclator to see what data rates you need to input. You can find one here:
https://www.3ivx.com/support/calculator/index.html
Just do a test at various pixel sizes but using the same data rates and see which ones look the best and play the most reliably. Again…there is no real science to it…just trial and error.
As for Flash Players, the two I mentioned are great, JW Player and Flow Player…but if your web partner isn’t familiar with them there is a good size learning curve with each of them. Wimpy Player’s Rave is another good player option that’s a tad easier to implement… and FLVPlayer is yet another decent one. Just google them.
The problem we’ve seen with Flash programmers is they build bulky, code heavy flash player interfaces that are often the real source of the playback problems….NOT the video itself. Plus, Flash Player in general is a renowned resource hog on almost every computer platform. As an example, I can compress a video to 640×360 H.264 and embed it by itself in a flash player on an otherwise blank HTML page and my old Windows 98 test machine chokes on the video at about 3 fps. I can then open VLC Player and connect to that same H.264 video file on the same server and that same video will play at 30fps on that 10 year old Windows 98 computer with a 1Ghz processor and 256MB of RAM. The ONLY difference is the player interface. It doesn’t matter if I use JWPlayer, FlowPlayer or a custom Flash Player, it won’t play on that old computer. But that file WILL play using VLC and connecting directly to the video file.
Now that’s a ridiculous test, but it illustrates how Flash impacts plaback performance. Another example is services like Netflix, who stream full HD movies wirelessly without problem using hardware devices like the X-box, PS3, Wii, Apple TV, Roku etc. The video stream is decoded using hardware, but it’s still being “streamed’ via wifi! Which means the data rate is probbably under 1.5Mb/sec! So it’s not always the data rate that determines playback. Decoding the video once it “arrives” so to speak is also a part of the equation.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
We need more info to give you good help. How long is the video? What is the pixel resolution and aspect ratio of the original file. What is the pixel resolution of the encoded file? What codec are you using?
I’ll make some guesses while we wait for your answers.
I’m guessing your 1.4GB file is about a minute? If that’s right, then a 12MB 60 second mp4 video file should playback fine on most cable based internet connections in a flash based player. If it’s shorter, say 30 seconds, it might playback on fast connections and certainly from a hard drive based website…but it could struggle on slower connections.
We try to keep videos to about 6-10MB per minute, which seems to ensure reliable playback across a wide range of connection speeds, computer platforms, browsers, flash player versions etc.
If it’s an art project, I’m also guessing the website isn’t actually on the web, but on a hard drive?? If that’s the case, then there is absolutely NO reason why a 12MB file won’t playback smoothly.
From my experience, flash developers and designers rarely understand video compression or video specs. In fact, web designers in general and IT people specifically don’t understand video for the web. Video people who also do websites understand video for the web.
Another thing that could cause issues is the flash player interface. If it’s not well-written, it could very easily cause a perfectly prepared video to stutter and NOT work. There is an entire industry of pre-built flash video players (JW Player, Flow Player to name 2) that thrives because of this issue. It makes absolutely no sense to custom design a Flash video player when there are half a dozen choices of pre-built ones that allow custom skinning. Why? Because these folks have tested and tweaked their code for years to optimize playback and compatibility with the latest video codecs.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
Make sure it’s not your media player causing the color shift. Play the encoded file in multiple media players, like VLC or any of half a dozen other freebie players out there for Windows (I assume you’re on Windows since you’re using Procoder).
If it’s not the media player changing the color, then if memory serves me, Procoder has a setting to adjust the color space in some of the presets. Check to see if your encoding settings has this and test the settings by encoding a short snippet of your animation using them. It’s usually called YUV, RGB etc.
If it doesn’t, I also believe that Procoder has filters for both gamma and color space. The color space filters can expand or shrink the video and black levels and the gamma adjusts the gamma up or down. Again, experiment with those to get your output looking right.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
Apace’s systems all work cross platform. They’re file-system and protocol agnostic. They don’t care what kind of OS you’re using.
They have many clients using them with both Windows and Mac editing systems in the same editing environment.
And I don’t work for Apace, we just happen to own one of their vStor systems and it does everything they say it does.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog