Video Tech For Working Bands
While the future promises “total convergence” of media and shipping systems, we’re not there yet, and it takes a bit (k, lots) of labor to get a video of your band streaming from your website. Whether it’s a music video à la MTV or a minimally edited tape of an (optimistically outstanding) performance, your promotional plan is incomplete without it. You want to jump into the Internet river of streaming media right now.
Stepping into the circulation The first step is to “rip” the video onto a computer’s hard pressure. “Most of what we do,” says Bee, “is proprietary, without any off-the-shelf software program, but for the common webmaster, there are tons of ripping programs, some loose and a few not.” Windows programs Flask MPEG and MPEG Mediator are unfastened; unfastened applications for Macintosh include Mac the Ripper and Handbrake. Other ripping applications, for both operating structures in addition to Linux, range in fee and sophistication from $10 to possibly $ hundred and offer a growing collection of alternatives as you move up the price ladder.
“Most webmasters,” keeps Bee, “will break the movie into clips, either as scenes or chapters like the original
or small 10- to 30-second clips” for promotional content material. These “clipping” paintings can be handled by way of single-reason applications — Bee says that a popular one for “slicing up video” is VirtualDub, freeware for Windows — however, properly-heeled webmasters, like maximum encoding firms, will use one high-end bundle for each clipping and modifying duties.
Next comes modifying, meaning the last editing, like putting watermarks, deleted scenes, and so on., on the producers’ route. “Again,” counsels Bee, “plenty of software may be accessible. The most popular Windows program might be Adobe Premiere, virtually now not loose, observed via Sony Vegas .” However, Adobe Premiere is also available for Macintosh; takingkes a 2d seat to Apple’s Final Cut Pro. A Google will unearth many freeware (no-value) or shareware (low-fee) packages for every computing environment, some of which are quite powerful for the charge.
Squeezing those pixels If you are a do-it-yourself webmaster, that is a vital step: encoding. Uptime Video of a route remains on the cutting fringe of hardware, and ses custom-made applications and strategies jobs in ways that are not likely to be duplicated by way of even the most gifted Web website owners working on my own. But everybody has to begin somewhere, or even using state-of-the-art off-the-shelf computer systems with freeware packages can yield first-rate, on occasion very good, results.
You should first decide what number of codecs to produce for streaming. For Uptime Video’s customers, says Bee, “We ensure we understand how and wherein they plan to use their content material.” For most site owners, keeps Bee, “.Wmv is the most famous format, followed by way of.Mpg. While .mpgis is an older, muddier codec, it’s far playable by almost all famous media gamers. Flash video is gaining principal momentum because, regardless of the computer, most browsers have trash players hooked up.”
Still, different formats are diffusion daily: RealVideo, QuickTime, diverse flavors of.Mpg, Av, I, and so on. Beginners can also discover it simpler to use “committed” encoders specializing in developing one format nicely — Windows Media Encoder for.Wmv, QuickTime Pro for QuickTime, Flash Video Encoder for Flash video — while greater skilled fingers (achieving into the deeper wallet) “can use software bundles like Sorensen Squeeze or VideoCharge,” says Bee. “With those, customers can encode to multiple formats through one piece of software and one interface.”
Once you’ve encoded your video — after trying diverse “bit charges” and compression schemes that affect smoothness of play and clarity of pix — it’s time to test with the agency’s web hosting your web page. Hosting firms no longer provide media servers and sufficient “bandwidth” (the quantity of data visitors allowed on a Web web page’s Internet offramp) with their bargain basement $9.95-a-month plans. Streaming media, track or video, entails a complex, power-hungry set of processes.
You also need to don’t forget the cease-users. One Hollywood recording studio spent hours perfecting a Web website with Flash movement portraits, audio/video clips, and stay chat talents, all in the unsuitable perception that “most people” have high-speed net connections. The website might also have succeeded in South Korea, where approximately 75 percent of internet customers have broadband. However, the studio owners made their site inaccessible to seven of every ten American Web surfers who still use dial-up connections.
Tomorrow’s coming fast. Major content distributors of a wide variety still provide low-bandwidth streams to serve all of the 56k modems. But if the future is now for those webmasters lagging behind the leaders, the destiny for MTV and other content material kings is drawing close as an onrushing teacher.
Bee consents. “We are already seeing the main shift to Flash video because of the power and inherent blessings, and [the] average specifications for a domestic laptop are most effective going to boom further,” Bee states, “in order to make extra superior formats greater possible.” The video veteran also sees the principal and vast implementation of high-definition (HD) video properly, beginning with the h.264 codec used for the latest Apple video iPods.
“We’ll see greater implementations of the h.264 codec in different codecs like Windows,” Bee predicts, “which include new derivatives or even multi-threaded formats that surpass h.264.” Naturally, the proliferation of HD video, coupled with the release of the latest HD-DVD players, will gasoline the ongoing development of HD encoding andl the desire for better compression.
Bee predicts that average bandwidth capacity will continue increasing as the Internet matures, so we should potentially see DVD-fine streams stay. While a few websites are already trying this, Bee calls their efforts “dramatically unsuccessful due to the modern-day technology boundaries.” For now, this is.
Others use this new technology, which may be used uniquely, not just for innovative purposes. It also can be used to guard your investment in tools. You can,n without difficulty, install low-cost webcams and different cameras as surveillance and security to protect the places where you preserve your steeply-priced system – studio, home, storage unit, anyplace. You can also set up a pc with a wireless card and send/acquire identical images to and from different computer systems or even mobile phones.