Chris Blair
Forum Replies Created
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Have you tried the Adobe forums? I would think this would be a much discussed issue if it’s prevalent.
I don’t have a solution but we gave up on Adobe Media Encoder back at version CS3. It’s always been extremely buggy and inconsistent and frankly just not at a level where we could trust it in a professional environment. Products from Telestream, Grass Valley (Procoder), and Sorensen are much more robust and reliable and are well worth their modest cost.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
We’ve managed some social media stuff for a handful of clients. Basically, the ones that work are companies and organizations that inherently involve a lot of social interaction.
For instance, the ones that have worked are a Water Park and a College. The ones that don’t are more business to business type companies. Remember, Facebook started as a way for college students at Harvard and other Ivy League colleges to communicate…it’s called “social media” for a reason.
With most people…if they get so much as a whiff of a company trying to blatantly “sell” them something on Facebook or Twitter or even YouTube…they’re put off by it. So our mantra to companies is, give people something of value.
The other thing we preach is, if you’re going to do it, commit to it and keep your account updated and provide relevant, timely information. As for who we get to do it, we mostly hire it out to local internet hosting companies (who all seem to offer the service), and we then mark it up. Or we consult with the company and they assign it to someone in-house.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
You must not deal directly with many web designers, web IT people or web administrators. Just today a web admin for a large, well-known healhfood company called to ask us to re-encode all the video on their site from the original H.264 encoded files to FLV files.
Why? Because she believes FLV files are more universally playable, start-up faster, and stream better than H.264 files.
We get this type of request and/or have this discussion every single week of the year. Are they living in black boxes? Heck I don’t know. I’m just letting the original poster know that if they’re submitting files to a third party web designer/developer, they could get pushback from them if they submit H.264. We’ve gotten in the habit of giving web developers both and we let them choose. I’ll bet 90% of the time they choose to use FLV despite our hearty recommendations for using H.264.
As for upgrading their Flash Tools…I agree with you. But they’re comfortable using what they know, and like many other businesses, companies are cutting back on software upgrades.
I was only using the old computer example as an extreme analogy. I’m not suggesting his target audience is using that for goodness sakes! I’m also not recommending On2VP6 FLVs over H.264, I’m just pointing out that they do stream more easily across a wider range of lightweight hardware.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
It should also be pointed out that MANY web developers, designers and web administrators STILL believe they need On2VP6 .flv files for video to work properly in Flash.
We continually get blank stares and resistance when pushing H.264 files of any type (f4v, mp4 or mov based etc.) to web designers, especially designers who use a lot of Flash on their websites.
We’ve especially seen this with flash developers who build their own flash video players that subsequently choke when fed H.264 encoded files. We’ve never pinpointed why this occurs, because we can take these same encoded files and make them play flawlessly using commercially available flash players like JWPlayer and FlowPlayer.
But the fact remains, MANY web designers want flv encoded files for use on the websites they build and administer. That said, we’ve found that you can get darn good quality using flv with just a slightly higher bit-rate than H.264…usually about 30%. And an flv file will play back on REALLY old computers. As an example, I have a 13 year old Windows 98 computer in my kitchen I use for word processing and email that can play flv files with no problem, but it literally will display about 1 frame every 3 seconds of any H.264 based video file. Yes..you read that right…it will display a still frame every 3-4 seconds of the same flv file it can play back at 30 frames per second.
So there are still good reasons to use flv if compatibility and wide playback reliability are important.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
You can record to a hardware based DVD recorder then use a little program called ifoedit to change the 4:3 flag to 16:9. We do it all the time for long-format stuff that would otherwise be a pain to software encode then author to DVD.
Here’s a tutorial (and link to download the free software).
https://www.dvdr-digest.com/articles/42_1.html
It’s Windows only so if you’re on a Mac, you’ll have to find another solution, but I imagine there is a similar tool out there somewhere for Mac as well.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
Virtually all compression programs have options with most of the codecs to compress to a certain size or MB/sec data rate.
It’s simple math from there to get to the file size you need. If you have a 60 minute video (3600 seconds), you just divide 4.3 GB by 3600 and get your rate (you can’t put a full 4.7GB onto a DVD).
Easier still…there are data rate calculators freely available on the web. https://www.videohelp.com has one:
https://www.videohelp.com/calc.htm
Just google for others… use those to determine what you need to fit into whatever size.
You also need to learn the difference between Kilobytes, Kilobits, Megabytes and Megabits to make intelligent decisions. Just google for those and you’ll find a bazillion explanations for them.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
Rick Turners: I believe the basic shoot + edit packages are drying up.. it’s accessible and children are learning how to do these things in 3rd grade, if not sooner. Give it 7 years and that market will be a professional wasteland.
Regardless of when kids are learning how to use video cameras or editing applications…there is a HUGE difference in the quality of what I would provide as a basic shooter/editor (with 25 years experience), vs. even a recent college graduate. Heck…there’s a huge difference in what I would provide vs. someone with 10 years of experience!
Some of those differences would be speed, reliability, quick decision making, experience from over 2500 shoots, from one-man band type deals to shoots with 25 person crews, the added benefit that I’ve worked as a producer and writer…I could go on for another paragraph or two.
People who want “effective” videos that teach, inspire and sell…hire professionals. People that want cheap videos that please the boss do it on themselves. There are dozens, hell hundreds of reasons why much of the industry is struggling right now. It drives me crazy to read all the posts from people who have these surefire reasons why the industry is going to do this or that. Let’s be honest. NOBODY knows what the industry is going to do or what the industry will be in 2 years or five years or ten years. It’s darn near impossible to predict what the industry is going to be doing in six months.
There will always be a place for high-quality production. The key is finding the clients who still want it and are willing to pay for it. Since it seems there are many companies deciding they no longer can afford…or for some reason don’t want quality production, the competition for those that do is going to be fierce.
I’m not sure I believe that doing production “differently” will necessarily result in more clients. I DO believe production professionals have to figure out how their skills transfer to other industries, like video encoding for the web, assisting web design companies with getting video onto their sites, even moving into web design since it’s much more similar to television graphic design than print design.
But there is STILL market for talented, experienced people in this business.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
The profile determines what the codec is allowed in terms of color space, data rates etc.
They basically are different encoding levels setup to meet a certain set of specifications of intended applications or playback devices. So a lot of the features or capabilities of H.264 are not possible in the majority of codecs used for the web.
For the iPhone and mobile apps, you have to use the lower level profiles since they have tiny and slow processors and the data rate capabilites of celluar data is slow.
There’s a more accurate explanation and description of the many profiles here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC#Profiles
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
And don’t forget a backup array for all those files!
You should also look at Apace. We have one of their systems and I can attest that it’s a rock-solid piece of equipment that does EXACTLY what they say it will do and their customer service is the best that I’ve ever gotten in 25 years in this business.
Not to mention their engineering people are as knowledgable about the needs of video production as anyone I’ve ever seen….and they’re BIG proponents of simple configurations that require very little IT knowledge (ok..you have to have some).
I don’t work for them nor do I shill for them…I’m just a happy customer that has seen his share of products that don’t live up to expectations….but Apace’s vStor and other products do everything they say…and they work great with Final Cut. They’ll give you the names, phone numbers and email addresses of owners using their system in similar comnfigurations to yours as well…so you can talk with people who are doing what you’re tying to do and get real-world feedback. Our eealer was IEEE in California and they were super to work with.
https://www.ieei.com/ieeibroadcast/vstor.shtml
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog -
There are even some very high-end encoding apps whose iPhone presets don’t work on the iPhone (not even the 3G). The best app on a Mac for making iPhone compliant files that we’ve found is Handbrake.
It’s iPhone presets DO work and they’re easy as pie to setup and even customize. But as Craig mentions, you can’t mess with the profile or the audio setting as if you get those wrong, it won’t be iPhone compliant.
Chris Blair
Magnetic Image, Inc.
Evansville, IN
http://www.videomi.com
Read our blog http://www.videomi.com/blog