So I thought I’d start by examining/rambling about the videos posted by the Alternate Focus, the San Diego-based non-profit organization I’m still loosely affiliated with.
The first and most recent video in the screening room is titled, “The Rise and Fall of Blackwater in Potrero” and tells the story of the mercenary (btw, they hate that term, they prefer “private security contractor ) company and their efforts to build a “training facility” in a small rural community east of San Diego. I served as Associate Producer on this show but I didn’t take part in any of the compression/uploading on this one. These and the other videos in the homepage and its screening room are sourced through blip.tv and already I can easily see the higher quality in these videos than those that we post on youtube. I think these half hour videos are about 300-600megs. After watching the first couple minutes, the stream caught up to the buffering so I decided to see how long it would take to buffer the entire 30 minute show: about 12 minutes on a mediocre comcast wireless set-up. I guess this is tolerable as I figure anyone who really wanted to watch this show would be patient enough to pause occassionally to let the stream catch up in exchange for a pretty good quality video.
I recall using Adobe Premiere’s encoder and a program called Super (I imagine there are better programs out there but it seemed to work fine at the time and it was free…is it malicious?) to take our 28:30 programs and stuff them into files less than 100 megs per Youtube’s requirements. I think I had to cut the frame rate to about 15 or so, shrink the resolution to no more than 320:240 and use pretty much the lowest audio quality settings. Although I think we get anywhere from 5-50 times more hits on youtube than our other video outlets, with all that trimming, most of the videos looked pretty shoddy, especially the ones with lots of visual effects and more frequent cuts. I think we could improve our encoding to allow a greater data rate during transitions. However, some of our shows are heavy on the talking heads for extended periods of time (it’s a weekly show, so sometimes we spit out interview shows and try to jazz them up as much as possible) so we can have a bit more flexibility in lowering video size/quality a bit to ensure that at least the audio is decent. I’m not sure what the solution is to getting better quality onto youtube…maybe splitting each show into multiple parts?
We also post our videos on
http://www.archive.org/details/AlternateFocus
in streaming format but also for download in various sizes in formats. This sounds swell, but again, this site gets only a fraction of the hits youtube gets. Perhaps people downloading files from here also forward them to others or post repost them somewhere???
Also, I contacted goleft.tv and uploaded a few of our better videos to their site and I think they function and look pretty good. Each file was about 300 megs and while the video window is a bit small the videos buffered pretty quick and sound adequate enough. However, despite a couple emails, I haven’t heard back from the goleft.tv folks about how many hits we’re getting so I’m not sure if this endeavor was worth my effort???
Look forward to class tomorrow………
