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Web Movies in the 21st Century

Fri, 22 Dec 2006

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Back in 1998 I did a job for one of the national newspapers which was to encode close to 50 hours of video material to be made available online as down-loadable web movies.

It took over a week to capture and encode the content which appeared in a miniscule window at a frame-rate of 15 frames per second. The results were stuttery, barely perceptible images which I was embarrassed to provide but did so as the requirements and expectations were set by the client. So I produced and provided exactly what was requested.

The whole experience turned me off movies on the web. If this is web movies I wasn’t interested. I’m into quality or at least content which is watchable. What was on the web at the time definitely wasn’t worth watching.

Zoom forward 8 years and we live in an age when YouTube, CNN, AOL, Virgin and a host of other internet sites feature video as an integral part of their websites - if not the major part of what they do. Watchable but still not great. Most of the today’s web content looks and sounds good enough to view but it is still a long way from the quality we get on television. Internet TV still has a long way to go.

I like exploring and pushing technology to the limit - I want something better than YouTube - yes it is ok but the quality is grainy, the viewing window is kind of small, and there is so much content one gets can easily get lost in the morass of media and spend a lot of time clicking through endless clips, trying to find gems amongst the dirt.

My passion is video production on the Mac platform. There must be a better way, I thought to myself. Thus began a series of experiments.

MPEG, WMV, QuickTime, Real, Flash - I started encoding and came up with mixed results. If I tried hard I could get something better than YouTube but it was a lot of effort and it really wasn’t that much better.

Then I hit gold - H.264 - now this codec is something that threatens to kill all that stands in its way. My experiments continued - I put my movies up on my websites - tested the results with contacts in the UK, USA and Australia and feel I’ve broken ground beyond what most of the sites are able to achieve.

So check it out and send me feedback. go to:

http://www.macvideo.tv

The movies can be watched in Medium or High rez versions. Assuming you are are on broadband then you shouldn’t have to wait more than a few seconds.

Click the "large" file at the bottom of screen for best results.

Posted by: Rick Young

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paintings & illustrations, mostly, which i upload to flickr.RT @fragmentedm

I draw manga/anime characters. I also do graphic design and photography.RT @spialelo

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