Web Video

Over the last few weeks, Mullet and I have been spending a lot of time discussing web video, and I realized haven’t written about it here very much.

When I started buying video gear seven years ago, the 3 major players in web video were QuickTime, Real Player, and Windows Media Player. All three played a range of codecs, but there weren’t easy ways of moving between the three formats. Being a Mac user, I used QuickTime by default, but I did have the other two players on my computer.

The players were all clunky and finicky. It wasn’t uncommon to see reduced frame-rates, lowered resolution, and even minimal action to make things look better.

Back then, I didn’t have a website or even an internet connection. The main means of delivering video was by running the signal from my capture card to my VCR. VHS was king—everyone, amateur or professional, used tape.

When I upgraded and got my G4, I suddenly had a DVD-R burner, and that led me to supplement Final Cut Pro with DVD Studio Pro (a couple months later, the Final Cut Studio bundle came out at a lower price than what it cost me to buy FCP and DVD-SP separately—thanks, Apple!).

Thus equipped, in 2003 I made history at the late, great Second Ciné video show by being the first to submit a video on DVD. But it was still a VHS world, and I backed up that DVD by exporting my clips to my VCR.

When I traded in my G4 for my G5, the new PCI expansion slot arrangement rendered my capture card useless, so I dropped the VHS option completely. By then, DVD burners were cheap enough that the indie world had shifted away from VHS.

DVD seemed to be the new king, unbeatable with its portability and flexibility. You could play it on your TV with a regular DVD player, or you could put it in a DVD-equipped computer. DVD sprouted in rental stores and retailers, offering special features and all the things impossible on VHS (subtitles and audio tracks in different languages, commentary tracks, alternate endings, etc, etc). The disks didn’t wear out like all tape-based technologies do—with care and handling, you would see the same image quality on the 1000th play as you would on the first play.

For an indie producer, you could easily crank out a DVD (maybe not the DVD-9 dual-layer format, but something that worked in most players and nearly all computers) that looked and played the same as the big boys’ disks.

I bought the 3rd edition of Chris Gore’s excellent film festival book in 2005, and we started to base our video efforts on the advice given. Film festivals were still king, and most of the ones that encouraged indie contributions readily accepted all the digital formats.

I bought Gore’s follow-up book on producing indie DVDs and used it as the main guide for our first appearance at the San Diego Comicon in 2006.

But it was at San Diego that I saw the future, and its name was not DVD but web video.

The big 3 players were still in the game, but Apple had introduced a new wrinkle—the iPod and iTunes. With incredible ease, you could download podcasts and listen to them on your Mac or iPod. The arrival of video-capable iPods sparked video podcasting. Flash video had arrived in force, with the help of some serious web video sites like YouTube. The big three media players changed membership, with Real player becoming a distant fourth. In fact, by 2006, I didn’t even have Real installed on my G5 as nobody was putting out video that QuickTime or WMP wouldn’t handle.

Gore and Mark Bell from Film Threat hosted a couple of panels at the con’s film festival (where my costumed appearance got some nasty looks from the black-clad filmistas—clearly a line is drawn in some people’s minds between the film fest and the convention itself!), and I attended a couple of them.

In one panel, Gore and Bell introduced the two guys behind Ask a Ninja as well as a couple of people from Hope is Emo, two of the most popular podcasts. I was still sans-internet at home, so I wasn’t aware of how big podcasting and web video had become. More people were watching these online videos than hundreds of film festivals put together.

But the indie aspect of these productions—Ninja was shot in the star’s apartment (painted up for green-screen production)—made it clear that you didn’t need a lot of money, just enough technology and, of course, a good idea well executed, to build an audience.

DVD suddenly looked less essential, just like VHS. Apple introduced its TV interface, and with flatscreen TVs and computer monitors becoming essentially the same, the average consumer realized they didn’t need a disk or tape to watch movies, TV shows, and indie video. The messy blue laser fight didn’t help, with the traditional market split into 3 different camps—DVD loyalists, Blu-Ray, and HD-DVD. Even with HD-DVD losing the fight, most people I know aren’t rushing into the blue laser world. After seeing CDs largely replaced by web music, most people are expecting the same of video.

So… in the 9 years I have been dabbling with indie video, I have seen it change completely. A physical product is no longer the primary goal since you can find a larger audience thorugh the magic of internet pixels.

Mullet and I are prepping our old feature, Babysitters, for web in small chapters. Our long-in-development DVD project is now a web video project with a DVD version also available. We’ll follow the footsteps of successful web video people like Rob Schrab or the guys behind Chad Vader and put the videos online and make a full-quality DVD available for sale.

More on web video to come. After all, it’s Tuesday. There’ll probably be some new development on Wednesday….

Upgrade Update and Why DVD Studio Pro is Teh Suck

First, an update on my upgrade plans. I’ve eliminated one option from my ongoing post-production software. Way, way back in an earlier entry, I wrote about upgrading from Final Cut Studio 1 on my G5. I played with Red Giant’s Magic Bullet suite and came away impressed. I also played with Adobe AfterEffect’s demo (which I haven’t blogged about yet). Last week, I started to research my third option, Final Cut Studio 2. That’s when I discovered a problem with FCS 2: my G5.

I have a 1.6 GHz G5, the low-end model of the first release, the slowest G5 ever made. I have a stock model, with an extra gigabyte of RAM. The original graphics card is the stock GeForce FX5200 Ultra, a card that isn’t certified to power Color or Motion 3. The card I would need is the Radeon X1900 G5 Mac Edition, which is no longer available new (Amazon and eBay prices range from $250 to $350 for used and "new" cards. Apple carries an X1900, but it's the version for the Mac Pros).

My G5 turns five in August, so I have to ask, “Is it worth spending $300 to upgrade an old computer so I can spend another $600 to get Color and Motion 3?

I’m not convinced my colour-correcting or motion-graphics skills are worth $1000. And there’s no guarantee my G5 will run the apps efficiently. Therefore, I’m taking Final Cut Studio 2 out of the equation. And then there were two….

And now our second topic. Last week, we got the Ed & Red appearances dubbed from VHS to mini-DV. I was able to capture the footage, edit everything in Final Cut, use Compressor to convert the footage for DVD, and then set up a project in DVD Studio Pro.

I’ve always found DVD Studio Pro to be the problem child of Final Cut Studio. It works great up until I start a build or format a DVD. I don’t recall any projects where I didn’t have to trash all the build files and start over. Sometimes, each disk I burned required me to trash and start over again. Clearly, Apple doesn’t care about the DVD—it’s the interwebs, stupid!

The Sock DVD is just for friends and family who missed our appearances, so I did a barebones project, with four options: both complete shows, the excerpts of us, a main menu, a menu for each show, and a disclaimer video to make sure nobody plays it around kids or at work. Nothing fancy, or so I thought.

So as I started to burn a test disk, the app crashed. One moment, it was on screen, the next, I was staring at the Finder. This happened every time. I trashed all the build files and folders, rechecked the project—everything I’d done in the past that had worked I did. But nothing worked, even after rebooting, checking Software Update for anything related to Final Cut Studio 1, sacrificing a goat to the gods, etc., etc.

So I trashed the video and audio files and re-rendered everything through Compressor again. I started from scratch and reprogrammed the DVD. But as I started to drop the video from one of the shows into its track, DVD Studio Pro again vanished. This happened each of the four times I tried it.

A third trip through Compressor seemed unavoidable, so I went back into Final Cut and removed the chapter markers from the troublesome track. Compressor churned out new files, and I went back into DVD Studio Pro muttering things about Steve Jobs. I put together the entire project from scratch, for the third frigging time. Then, sure I was ready to toss the G5 off the balcony, I clicked on Build/Format again, but opted to build a disk image instead of burning directly to disk. Then I went into the next room and watched TV to bring my blood pressure down.

To my shock and horror, DVD SP actually worked. I had a working disk image on my hard drive. Using OS X’s Disk Utility, I burned the image to a blank DVD and, lo and behold, I had a working DVD. So… hopefully… this is a workaround that continues to work going forward.

DVD SP allows you great control over every aspect of your DVD, so I am frustrated by Apple’s inability to prevent it from blowing up real good….