Workflowed

Streamlining Android Interfaces

2012-01-28T13:29:00.002-05:00

During our Streaming Media Europe 2011 presentation on video challenges and opportunities for the Android OS, an audience member raised the question of UX (or user interface) designs being inconsistent.

As I showed in my presentation slides, and detailed in response to the audience members question, we had to add additional time into our testing methodology to compensate for the hodgepodge of UX designs—a problem that's consistently plagued the open-source operating system spread across dozens of handset manufacturers and hundreds of wireless service provider networks

Scott Main, lead tech writer for developer.android.com, put together an informative blog post ("Say Goodbye to the Menu Button") on the need for streamline interfaces.

The post was published on Tim Bray's blog and has garnered attention for the more consistent and, one hopes, minimalistic approach to Android interfaces .

Now that Ice Cream Sandwich is gaining steam—and not just for its use of Apple HTTP Live Streaming, or HLS—Main writes that it's time to retire the overused fourth wheel, the Menu button catch-all that impacts so many pre 3.0 Android device interfaces.

"If I had to put this whole post into one sentence," wrote Main, "it’d be [this]: Set targetSdkVersion to 14 and, if you use the options menu, surface a few actions in the action bar with showAsAction="ifRoom"."

It's about time we moved Android UX to a consistent approach, and eliminating the fallback Menu button is a good first step...

Does Logitech Revue Android 3.1 Honeycomb update intentionally eliminate video playback options?

2011-12-16T10:24:00.002-05:00

In a series of well-publicized comments last month, Logitech CEO ..., lambasted Google for providing "beta software" (his term for Google TV) for the Logitech Revue. The remarks were widely publicized as a condemnation of Google TV in general, and I was even swayed that way for a StreamingMedia.com article.

Yet when the Revue firmware update rolled out earlier this week, ostensibly supporting Google TV 2.0 (Android 3.1 or Honeycomb) on the Revue, it lacked some of the basic Google TV 2.0 video features that rival set-top box manufacturer Sony chose to include these codecs in its award-winning NSZ-GT1 (a Wi-Fi-enabled 1080p Blu-ray disc player featuring Google TV).

It appears Logitech may have no one to blame but themselves for the Revue sales fiasco. In research for a new StreamingMedia.com article about the Revue update, to be published later this week, I came across two interesting facts: first, there appeared to be frustration within Google with Logitech even before Google TV 2.0 was announced; and second it's now apparent that Logitech itself chose to eliminate some of the support video codecs and protocols from the Revue update.

What was the frustration that Google faced with Logitech? According to a blog poster a little over a month ago, at least one Googler expressed frustration with the fact that Logitech wasn't implementing the full Google TV 1.0 specification:

I spoke to a friend who works at Google last night. He said that even though Google TV may support a format, the Logitech Media Player is the gating factor and at least in 1.0, this has really sucked. . . . Here is the official Honeycomb/TV 2.0 format support. It's satisfyingly complete, but it remains to be seen how well the Logitech player does.

This isn't a validated claim, but reading through a few interview answers from a Google TV product manager, Larry Yang, in the days following the most recent Revue update, it's easy to infer that the same level of frustration is still below the surface.

So what did Logitech choose to eliminate from the Revue? Two major findings, as noted in a new StreamingMedia.com article reviewing the Revue update, are M2TS (MPEG-2 Transport Streams) and the MPEG-2 codec.

One could argue, I suppose, that it is logical that these were eliminated, as the Revue itself lacks of DVD or Blu-ray player. Yet that falls short in two areas in my mind.

First, the lack of a DVD player means that many consumers may choose to play backup copies of their physical DVDs on a media player precisely like the Logitech Media Player on the Revue. To do so at original quality, though, they'd need to transfer their wedding or bar mitzvah or graduation DVDs using a non-intermediate codec and a container format that supports both.

Using a program like the one recommended by PC World, which copies either MPEG-2 or H.264 codec-based content bit-for-bit into the open-source Matroska (MKV) container format supported by Revue, the user should be able to view this backup content on the Revue at the same quality as the original DVD.

Yet, while this scenario works on the Sony NSZ-GT1, it no longer works on the Revue, because Logitech doesn't allow MPEG-2 content to decode on the Revue.

Second, the ability to support popular MPEG-2 transport stream-based streaming delivery is another key reason for the Revue to support M2TS, .ts and the MPEG-2 codec. Anyone out there own both an iPod, iPad or iPhone AND a Logitech Revue? Thought so.

In an email interview with GTV Box Player creator, Alexander Kolychev, I learned that the original Google TV Honeycomb beta supported M2TS and Transport Streams and Primary Streams on the Revue, but that Logitech has chosen to "shut off" that support.

Read the portion of Alexander's interview where he fingers Logitech for turning off MPEG-2 and .ts support at StreamingMedia.com, but read on for a few more comments he'd made...

Q. If I used the same GTV Box app on both the Sony and the Revue units that I have sitting here for testing, only the Sony would play a DVD turned into an MKV-based format file, correct?

AK: Yes, the same app will react differently on the Logitech Revue or Sony NSZ-GT1. If you watch an MKV file [with H.264 codec-based content], it will play on both Logitech Revue and Sony NSZ-GT1, but... if you have MPEG2 video codec inside your MKV, you will have only sound, not video on Logitech. The Sony NSZ-GT1 will play it perfectly.

The same is true if you try to play VOB or TS file: it will play on Sony, as the NSZ-GT1 has native support for M2TS, but it will fail completely on Logitech.

Q: Can you get any more information on why Logitech would eliminate the ability to use the MPEG-2 codec or primary / elementary streams (PS / TS)? It seems odd that they'd eliminate a key ability in Google TV as they try to "improve" the Logitech Media Player...

AK: Google's developers are having Hangout next week with some senior engineer of Google TV. I am going to ask them questions about all this things...

[Update: while we've not received a statement from Logitech, it's interesting to note that Amazon is now selling refurbished Revue units at $79.99 with Prime shipping, pushing the unit to #22 in overall Amazon Electronics sales. It's not dead yet...]

DASH it all?

2011-12-15T09:35:00.000-05:00

MPEG-DASH has been ratified by 24 national bodies, a topic covered in a recent StreamingMedia.com article and also at StreamingLearningCenter.com (run by Jan Ozer).

Now that we, as an industry, have reached a tentative agreement on how to handle adaptive streaming over HTTP through consistent parsing of manifest files (MPD or Media Presentation Description in MPEG DASH parlance) there's another question remaining: what's next?

The next two steps, as noted in both the Streaming Media article and our own white paper, is the acceptance of a common file format and a common encryption scheme (CENC).

Following ratification of CENC and adoption of the common file format, there's a huge need to deal with interoperable, DASH-compliant players. In fact, this element may be the biggest challenge of all—getting encoded content to consistently play back on every device or platform.

It's the same issue we faced during the two reports (1, 2) on Android handset and tablet video playback, where core services of Android didn't necessarily translate into consistent playback of RTSP or even YouTube videos on a variety of playback devices from the same handset manufacturer.

So Transitions is issuing a challenge, as part of our 2012 Q1 Best Workflows testing: bring us your DASH-compliant player, whether it's in beta or gold master, and we'll put it through its paces against other DASH-compliant players, using consistent fMP4 and M2TS content. Here's looking at you, Qualcomm, Ericsson and even Microsoft and Adobe...

The Laws Of Gravity Do Not Apply...

2011-11-28T11:21:00.001-05:00

When the AT&T and T-Mobile USA merger was announced back in March 2011, the reaction was different between two rivals: Dan Hesse, CEO of Sprint, declared it would be bad for competition, while the CEO of Verizon Wireless, Lowell McAdams, said it was inevitable.

McAdams went so far as to say, at an analyst meeting in September, that it would happen just like a particular force of nature always occurs. He spoke of it in the past tense, according to Boy Genius Report, as if it had already occurred:

“I have taken the position that the AT&T merger with T-Mobile was kind of like gravity. It had to occur."

Apparently the rules of gravity no longer apply, as AT&T last week withdrew its application to the FCC to merge with T-Mobile USA.

Is it a dead matter? Not yet. See this StreamingMedia.com article on the nature of the issues facing AT&T.

Why are fMP4 and MPEG-DASH so important?

2011-11-17T10:00:00.004-05:00

Quote from a white paper Transitions just completed on fragmented MP4 (fMP4) and MPEG-DASH:

Proponents say that the Common File Format (CFF) and Common Encryption (CENC) scheme will represent two important steps toward large-scale online video distribution via adaptive delivery of fragmented elementary streams.

Since CFF can also be used outside of the bounds of UltraViolet, significant interoperability may also exist between UltraViolet disc-based playback and online video platforms, in much the same way that the DVD Forum’s published specifications for DVD playback guaranteed interoperability between DVD players. It’s not out of bounds to think of CFF as the DVD standard for the web.

To get a better understanding of the power of fragmented MP4, first look at the sidebar in the white paper on "combinatorial complexity" for which Netflix contributed a real-world example. Even without CFF and CENC, Netflix is proving the case that fMP4 scales much better than the HLS approach (with a far lower asset management impact).

The white paper has been several months in the making, starting first as separate concepts by two key companies in the streaming space: Adobe Systems and Microsoft Corporation. Each has their proprietary solutions, but both are committed to seeing fragmented MP4 (fMP4) offer a potentially viable alternative to legacy streaming solutions.

After several meetings, both companies chose to jointly work with Transitions to create a white paper noting the benefits of fMP4 and, to a slightly lesser extent, the potential benefits of MPEG-DASH (a proposed standardization of dynamic streaming over HTTP that I mentioned in a prior blog post).

Special thanks to Microsoft and Adobe for providing financial resources and access to subject-matter experts, who spent time expanding on key concepts and the ever-changing nature of fragmented MP4 and the MPEG-DASH ratification process.

The full white paper can be found here.

[Addition: Adobe and Microsoft have both published blog posts, outlining their support for fMP4 and mentioning reasons for working together: Adobe's Kevin Towes blog post Microsoft's Chris Knowlton blog post]

Flashless for Mobile? Not Exactly

2011-11-11T14:57:00.010-05:00

There's quite a bit of confusion about the impact of Adobe's decision (or what exactly the decision was) in regards to Flash Player of Mobile. Rightfully so, as the company didn't spell out its intent to its users at the same time it pushed out news to analysts during the 9 November analyst day briefing.

Besides the StreamingMedia.com article titled "Into (not so) thin AIR" (self-plug) there are two Adobe blog posts that may help explain where the company is going...or at least what it plans to still support:

Pritham Shetty's "Adobe Flash for Premium Video" blog post spells out what's in and what's out.

Mike Chambers's blog post, "Clarifications on Flash Player for Mobile Browsers, the Flash Platform and the Future of Flash" does a good job explaining the "why" of unsustainable growth in complexity Adobe faced in the wild-west atmosphere surrounding Android forking.

We conjectured, in the "thin AIR" article posted on StreamingMedia.com, that Android forking complexities could cause Adobe's costs to run rampant. It was helpful to get confirmation a few hours later, when Mike posted his Clarifications blog post, that Adobe had indeed seen this Great Wall of Android that it had to scale, and chosen a wiser path.

DASH of this, DASH of that...

2011-11-09T10:30:00.003-05:00

It's apparent that MPEG-DASH is getting traction—or at least attention—if attendance at the 2011 StreamingMedia West show's panel on MPEG-DASH is any indicator.

It wasn't just standing-room, as alluded to in the StreamingMedia.com article, but was sitting-room only. It's been quite some time since I've seen this level of interest in a topic.

A few notes that didn't make it into the article:

MPEG-DASH will never define a codec, but with DASH-264 there's a move to use an H.264 codec in an MP4 container with a common file format (CFF) and common encryption (CENC).... There's also a possibility of adding DASH-264 into the HTML5 standard, since W3C requires a codec to be considered in HTML5 but MPEG-DASH itself is codec agnostic.

Interesting note about who has been participating and who has not:

Apple has been participating in MPEG-DASH from the beginning; they have contributed actively. We've not seen Google participating in DASH, but our codec agnostic approach means that WebM could be used within DASH (we can already do with profiles around M2TS).

What about royalties? An audience member's question got this reply:

From a licensing standpoint, there is a requirement to notify ISO of their intent to license; Qualcomm and Cisco have announced they'll offer royalty-free since HTTP adaptive streaming has been done for a number of years but to get to a standard we need to see a path forward to royalty-free licensing.

Netflix or Blockbuster: Do Either Offer Total Access?

2011-10-27T23:10:00.000-04:00

When it comes to online streaming of premium content, it appears that less is less instead of more.

Netflix stumbled badly, announcing this week that 800,000 subscribers left the service last quarter—over 200,000 more than the company had predicted as its "worst case" scenario. Part of the stumble was an assumption that customers would pay the same amount for online video access to a limited number of movies as they would for a much broader library of DVDs delivered by mail.

I covered this topic two days ago in an online article for StreamingMedia.com, a newsletter and magazine for which I have freelanced for a number of years. After the article was published, a radio station in Seattle, KOMO, requested a phone interview which I did on the 26th.

In addition, the editor of StreamingMedia.com, Eric Schumacher-Rasmussen, was also asked to be part of a section on Netflix on PBS Newshour show this evening.

To say this topic is hot would be an understatement, and Eric did a good job bringing to light—in a public forum—what we've often said on StreamingMedia.com: the online premium content world is still nascent and needs to grow to match the expectation (or hype) that many in our industry have pushed when trying to make streaming inventories equal to offline availability.

There's a need for a consolidated approach to online video libraries, ideally through a broader offering of content by a single provider; in the meantime, I'll also cover another approach that indexes what's available on multiple sites. Look for that article in a few weeks.

2011 Streaming Media Europe: Challenges for Android Video Delivery

2011-10-18T22:59:00.000-04:00

In between trips to Nigeria and Ghana (for pro-bono work) I was able to speak at today's Streaming Media Europe 2011 conference, on the topic of Android video delivery.

The session presentation is available for download and StreamingMedia.com may eventually post the session video.

The presentation was a walk through the findings we reported in two white papers on the battery impact and performance impact of Flash Player for Mobile 10.1 (first report) and Flash Player for Mobile 10.2 / 10.3 (second report).

The findings, however, were the same for both tests: the native applications don't work nearly as consistently for video playback, and the impact of Flash Player for Mobile on battery life is a small price to pay for consistency in delivery (as in the actual ability to use hardware acceleration to play back full-screen, full-motion video).

2012 Q1 Best Workflows

2011-09-16T12:17:00.004-04:00

Transitions has been hard at work on several continents (four and counting) over the past three months, after publishing attributed results for one company that participated in the 2011 Q1 Best Workflows research report.

Within the next two months, we expect to release invitations for the follow-on 2012 Q1 Best Workflows report, based on interest expressed by a number of companies. Stay tuned for more details.

2011 Q1 Best Workflows: Elemental Technologies

2011-07-22T23:08:00.001-04:00

In December 2010, we published the 2010 Best Workflows report, a generic version of testing Transitions performed for a number of transcoding and live encoding hardware/software solutions. The report mentioned a few invited companies, but did not detail any one particular participant.

Elemental Technologies has requested that their findings be published, as the company did exceptionally well in a number of categories. The report, labeled as 2011 Q1 Best Workflows: Elemental Technologies, containing the same test results from the December 2010 final report, reveals a company hitting its stride on several fronts.

Flash Player 10.2 for Android Handsets and 10.3 for Motorola Xoom Tablet

2011-05-28T05:34:00.003-04:00

Devices powered by the Android OS are gaining in popularity, with first quarter 2011 sales of Android-powered devices far outstripping those of Apple's iOS and Research In Motion's BlackBerry OS.

Yet the success brings with it a major issue—OS forking and code modification—inherent to open-source operating systems. The biggest area where this divergence can be viewed (or not viewed, as the case my be) is in the area of media consumption.

Our most recent report, titled The Right Fit? Video Playback Performance on Android Handset and Tablet Devices Using Adobe Flash Player 10.2 and 10.3 delves into the question of Adobe's Flash Player as a potential universal player for various media types on Android phones and tablets.

We found that Adobe Flash Player seems to be progressing, alongside advances in the Android OS itself, to a point where we're seeing full frame-rate, high-quality playback on a number of devices.

While this sounds like a no-brainer, our last set of tests found few devices capable of playing 24 frame per second (fps) content at 24 fps, let alone playing back traditional video content at the 29.97 fps required to match fluid television playback.

Yet the past two months have significantly upped the ante: Adobe Flash Player 10.3 on the Motorola Xoom tablet was able to match native content's frame rates (both 24 and 29.97 fps) once the Motorola Xoom was upgraded to Android OS 3.1. This is an increase of 10-15% in frames-per-second playback, compared to Flash Player 10.2 on Android 3.0.1—the original shipping Xoom operating system.

In addition, the Motorola Atrix handset, which contains the same dual-core Tegra 2 processor and GPU, turned in impressive results. The Samsung Galaxy S also improved over its results in our initial tests of six Android handsets and now takes advantage of hardware acceleration for decoding.

The combination of an updated Android OS and an updated Adobe Flash Player seems to provide a much more consistent media experience for the average user.

Review: Video Compression for Flash, Apple (iOS) devices and HTML5

2011-05-20T13:56:00.002-04:00

Jan Ozer, a colleague and friend who writes for Streaming Media magazine and a number of other online and magazine publications, has just released his most recent book: Video Compression for Flash, Apple Devices and HTML5.

The 258-page book covers the title's topics in detail, looking first at the evolution of the H.264 video codec (also known at AVC as well as MPEG-4 Part 10 for ITU and ISO) and how it has been adopted by Adobe for Flash Player, Apple for its past and current player (QuickTime 7 and QuickTime X, respectively) and Microsoft for its Silverlight player.

Jan then moves on to the questions of royalties (a topic I've covered in multiple articles, including one on H.264 and one on WebM) and then moves into the meat of the book: tips and tricks for working with a variety of compressor tools, including Apple's Compressor, Rhozet's Carbon Coder, Sorenson's Squeeze, Telestream's Episode and several others.

When it comes to specific environments where H.264 content will be played back, Video Compression for Flash, Apple Devices and HTML5 really shines. Whether it's encoding for the specific vagaries of Blu-Ray discs, Apple's multiple iOS devices—including the variations for iPhone/iPod versus the larger screen size of the iPad—or just the basics of Flash or Silverlight playback, the book examines processing and protocols necessary to make your streaming or offline delivery of H.264 a success.

Jan's focus is on software-only encoding solutions, but the principles are the same for hardware-based encoding and transcoding solutions, such as the Elemental Server, Elemental Live and Inlet Spinnaker products tested during last year's 2010 Best Workflows report.

I highly recommend Video Compression for Flash, Apple Devices and HTML5 for anyone needing to refine their media compression workflow, as the tips and insights Jan Ozer provides are pertinent to a variety of today's hottest consumer electronics devices.

Thunderbolt workflows

2011-03-11T10:20:00.001-05:00

In a StreamingMedia.com article about the new MacBook Pro, published two weeks ago, we discussed the potential of camera connectivity through the new Thunderbolt port.

Today, Intel announced that Canon—makers of the fine EOS D-SLR cameras as well as consumer and professional video cameras—will be supporting the Thunderbolt technology. An Intel press release reads, in part:

Hiroo Edakubo, Group Executive of Canon’s Video Products Group stated, "We are excited about Thunderbolt technology and feel it will bring new levels of performance and simplicity to the video creation market."

Read additional thoughts on this topic—and the implications for live production equipment sizes—on our follow-up blog post at EventDVLive.com.

Roxio Toast Turns 11; But Can It Add?

2011-03-11T10:03:00.003-05:00

In September, 2010, we posted an article about the issues highlighting the problem that Roxio Toast 10 Titanium Pro had with basic addition. The addition problems caused the program to underestimate how much content it could fit on a Blu-Ray disc. After eight hours of encoding, the actual number that Toast presented would be wildly off—to the tune of three or four gigabytes (3-4 GB).

This week, Sonic Solutions, who owns the technology and the Roxio brand name, announced the release of Roxio Toast 11 Titanium. Titanium is a lower-cost version of Toast (which also comes in a Pro version) and Titanium now contains the Blu-Ray plug-in that was only available in the Toast 10 Pro. This move saves users about $40 off the cost of purchasing Pro if Blu-Ray is the primary focus of your Toast usage.

Yet the question remains: can Toast 11 Titanium add any better than the previous Pro version? We're hearing initial reports of similar issues, which really brings into question Sonic's quality control on the Toast products, but we'll let you know what we find when we do a thorough review next week.

We are also hearing Toast 11 has speed issues in burning discs, where the speed of a 16x burner is reduced to 2x (even though the same burner runs at 15-16x in Toast 10).

Stay tuned to find out if remedial math works for Toast.

Flash Player 10.1 for Android: Performance King or Resource Hog?

2011-02-13T16:26:00.008-05:00

A little over a month after completing our 2010 Best Workflows comparison, Transitions has decided to tackle another vexing question: does Flash Player 10.1 on the Android OS platform really impact battery life of mobile handsets?

If it does, is the performance gain worth it?

Read the results of our initial five-day test period, on a number of Android-based devices, including the the original Droid, Droid2, Droid Incredible, EVO, Nexus S and the core Galaxy S.

To put all the fuss about mobile Flash Player usage in perspective, consider that smartphone shipments accounted for 101 million units per quarter at the end of 2010, an increase of 87% over the same period in 2009. According to research firm IDC, smartphone shipments in 2010 outpaced PC shipments for the first time, with PC growth only progressing at 3% for the fourth quarter of 2010, on shipments of 92 million units.

It’s also worth noting how fast mobile Flash Player penetration grew: 28.7% of US smartphones are based on Android, an increase of 7.3% in market share over the last quarter. By the end of 2010, Android-based handset shipments surpassed the number of shipping iPhones devices: Apple’s iPhone market share is now only 25.0% excluding iPads (of which over 7 million were sold in the fourth quarter, while Android-based tablets are just emerging).

In other words, Flash-equipped smartphones now outnumber iOS handsets. Adobe’s intent to bring the Flash Player plug-in to other mobile OSes (Blackberry, et al) will only widen that gap.

20110209-Android-FlashPlayer10.1-Performance

The Clutter Cutter: NeatDesk for Mac

2011-01-10T11:40:00.001-05:00

Our increasingly interconnected, automated and digitized world offers many benefits for businesses large and small. Yet one frustrating business situation seems almost impossible to solve: mountains of paper.

In the form of printed documents, receipts, expense records and all those business cards gathered from new contacts and business prospects, paper documents are one of the few things we can't seem to dig our way out from under.

I have tried several systems to deal with the mounting piles of pertinent information that still land in my home office, from the “desk stack” chess game to the “Pendaflex shuffle” in actual filing cabinets, to the “toss box” with the current year’s date marked on the side.

All of these systems have some merit. Looking back from the beginning of 2011, however, I still don’t know exactly what I have stored in all these collection areas from 2010. Throughout the past year, I found myself saying aloud all too often, “Is that contract in this pile? I’ve got to get the Scope of Work written!” and “Where is the receipt for last week’s prospecting lunch? I need to expense that.” I’ve also grown tired of storing all those business cards I collect, a desk drawer full of them.

One thing is certain at the dawn of a new year, I’m losing precious office space, time and ultimately money trying to keep up with all these dead trees. I'd happily recycle them all if I could just find an efficient and cost-effective way to organize the information in an easily accessible—preferably digital—form.

I’ve been looking for an automated solution that can feed all this stuff into my Mac and, ideally, integrate the data with Google Apps cloud-based document management that my consulting business uses.

With that end in mind, I recently decided to try the NeatDesk for Mac Desktop Scanner and its Digital Filing System.

Installation of the NeatWorks for Mac software and Neat Desk ADF scanner was easy and straightforward. The application even asked to autoupdate the first time I opened it. Nice touch.

During the installation, NeatDesk automatically created a Neat Library database file in the root of my Documents folder. When accessed through the NeatWorks for Mac application, this Digital Files System (DFS) provides a "cabinet" and a collection of customizable Folders within the cabinet that store all of the documents, receipts and business cards I scan. Working with the same paradigm in the paper world, NeatWorks use of the cabinet metaphor is helpful, as it’s getting hard to teach this dog new tricks.

NeatDesk scanner was fast and easy to use. For receipts and business cards, the OCR capabilities of the NeatWorks software does a good job in analyzing and segmenting the data off the scanned documents into their appropriate fields. No surprise here, as the original incarnation of this product, NeatReceipts, was geared towards generating expense reports.

All scanned items, whether a document, receipt or business card, land in the NeatWorks “Inbox” where you begin the filing process, with the software automatically identifies the type item you just scanned. Using the OCR data, NeatWorks automatically gathers metadata from the item to better identify its contents.

The application does have some problems with business cards that have colored backgrounds or unusual layouts. In this case you can easily edit and add the metadata yourself.

Interestingly, you don’t have to depend on the NeatDesk scanner to get data into NeatWorks. Anything that can be printed on the Mac can be sent to NeatWorks via the Neat specific options in the "Save to PDF" button in the print dialog box. This is helpful for me, personally, as a way to store some digital items I used to convert to paper for organizational purposes.

A few other features stand out. First, the data NeatWorks gathers from business cards creates contacts that can be exported to Apple's integrated Address Book, handy if you are synching Address Book with Google or Yahoo.

Second, receipts can be exported in .qif files for accounting and tax purposes in Quicken, or as individual PDFs to send to cloud-based apps such as Expensify. Scanned items can also emailed, through Apple's Mail application or other third-party applications such as Entourage or Outlook for Mac.

Lastly, by configuring the Folder Sync settings in the properties of any NeatWork’s Folder, you can automatically export the Folder’s contents from the Neat Library to the Mac’s local file system as individual PDFs. This feature is useful in that you can maintain copies of your critical data outside of NeatWorks, “just in case” the Neat Library file becomes unavailable. You can also upload these PDFs to Google Docs, for example, so they can be accessed via the cloud. Given these export and data movement options, I’m not concerned about all the scanned data living in the Neat Library database file.

All in all, I am happy to report that The Neat Company has put out a system that I believe can help me to slay “the Paper Monster” as they so aptly put it. While I don't think I'll ever be able to get to a "paperless" mode of working, I look forward to providing an update on my "less paper" resolution some time in the next few weeks, including whether it integrates well with Google Apps for cloud-based storage of documents I need on the run.

2010 Best Workflows

2010-12-28T14:24:00.004-05:00

A bit longer in the making than anyone would like, but full of good information to set a baseline for live encoding and file-based transcoding workflows. We're happy to present the 2010 Best Workflows report, another in the Transitions in Technology white paper series.

Within the next few days, we also hope to be able to reveal details from a few participants. We'll keep you posted.

[Update: Elemental Technologies chose to publish their findings, which can be found at this link as the 2011 Q1 Best Workflows report, containing the same information as the 2010 Best Workflows plus additional information specific to the Elemental outcomes. Enjoy!]

Has Fujitsu Abandoned the Macintosh Platform? ScanSnap Snow Leopard Issues

2010-12-04T22:35:00.000-05:00

Fujitsu had a good thing going, with the ScanSnap for Mac offering one of the best scan-to-PDF options.

But like all good things, this one looks like it's coming to an end, as ScanSnap on the Snow Leopard platform is walking around gingerly on only two paws.

Consider this:

1. The S1500M is the only current Mac-based ScanSnap scanner; all the others (S300M, S500M, S510M) are on Fujitsu's discontinued list.

2. CardIris 3.6, which ships with the S1500M, is not compatible with Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6). CardIris 4.0 is compatible, but you don't receive that version when buying an S1500M

3. Adobe Acrobat is now at version 10 with Acrobat X. Which version ships with the S1500M? Acrobat 8. Yes, that's right, the only Fujitsu Mac ScanSnap has a version of Acrobat Pro that's TWO versions old.

When I asked Fujitsu about upgrading to Acrobat 9, six months after it launched, I was told that what you buy is what you get. Meaning that anyone buying an S1500M today will get Acrobat 8.

Fujistu is clearly choosing to abandon the Mac platform, as they've not made a ScanSnap unit that's Mac compatible since 2008.

How's that for progress?

PDF viewing in Apple's Preview looking fuzzy? Welcome to Acrobat X on Snow Leopard

2010-11-30T12:07:00.001-05:00

I'm working through a few workflow scenarios with Acrobat X's scanning and optical character recognition (OCR) for an upcoming comparison study. Along the way, though, I have two quick insights in to Acrobat X.

First, it does a great job of shrinking the file size automatically after the text recognition is run. In many cases, I don't even have to run the "reduce file size" feature to bring multi-page documents to a manageable file size.

Second, the issue that cropped up under Apple's Preview in Acrobat 9, after I'd applied the "reduced file size" to shrink the file size, remains. The image will look blocky and jagged, as if a great bit of information has been abandoned.

I initially chalked the issue up to an error in the file reduction algorithms, but the advent of Acrobat X—with its better-than-average standard compression—brings the issue back to the forefront. Even without running the "reduce file size" feature in Acrobat X, any file that's been OCRed will appear jagged and blocky within Apple's Preview application.

Researching the topic online didn't turn up any clues, probably because Acrobat X is so new; since I couldn't ignore this issue, as it affects all the scans I was applying OCR to, I turned to my contact at Adobe's PR agency to get insight in to the issue.

It turns out that Adobe X's new rendering engine may steal a few pages from Acrobat 9's file size reduction score. In doing so, this presents a potential rendering issue in Apple's Preview. According to my contact:

Acrobat X's new scan compression technology divides the image into 3 layers - Background (BG), Foreground (FG) & Mask. BG, FG images are highly down sampled while mask is kept at a higher resolution (to maintain text readability).

The layering makes sense, as Adobe has always had the ability to choose Image-Text (where the image overlays the underlying OCR text) or Text-Image (where the text attempts to lay out in a patter closely resembling the image, but the text is the top layer).

I've always opted for Image-Text, as it allows the human looking at the document to read what's actually on the page, should he or she find the OCR text they copied from the PDF a bit, well, lacking.

My contact went on to provide some reasoning behind the miss-match of Preview and Acrobat Reader X, the latter of which seems to display the images in a much higher quality output:

Here is our hypothesis on the reason of low quality rendering by Preview. In order to render a page, it down samples mask to the resolution of FG (or maybe BG), so it loses on text crispness or quality that a high resolution mask provides. Adobe Reader/Acrobat, on the other hand, up samples images to the highest of the resolution of BG, FG and mask to get the rendered bitmap.

Is this the reality? I guess we'll have to see whether Apple issues an update to Preview in the near term. If not, I'm stuck either suggesting that every client upgrade to Acrobat Reader X, or choosing to completely forego the workflow of using QuickLook to view text-heavy OCRed documents.

Transitions In Technology Series: Juniper Media Flow

2010-09-27T14:41:00.001-04:00

Over the past few months, we've been hard at work on a workflow article on Juniper's Media Flow technology, which the company has been integrating since the acquisition of Ankeena.

This paper is called "Refining Media Delivery: Intelligent Caching Comes of Age" and covers a variety of aspects around intelligent media caching. This is the first paper in the Transitions in Technology white paper series, a series of commissioned documents that leverage the Transitions' team's experience in the marketplace to tell a compelling story.

In this case, it's a story that we've followed for several years, as Ankeena announced Media Flow Controller. We think the acquisition bodes well for Juniper's move in to the scaleable media marketplace.

Here's the link to the white paper. Enjoy!

Does Adobe Elements 9 Plays Well With All?

2010-09-21T08:57:00.003-04:00

Adobe today announced its Elements 9 consumer image- and video-manipulation products (editing sounds so 1990s) in the form of Photoshop Elements 9 and Premiere Elements 9.

Over the past few releases, Elements has begun to move toward parity on both the Macintosh and Windows platform, but the Mac version had always lagged behind.

It appears the days of second-class citizenry for Mac users may be over, though, as Adobe lists an equal feature set between the Mac and Windows versions of both Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements.

Premiere Elements, in particular, now has the sharing and access to the Plus service, which gives up to 20 GB of storage for approximately $50.00 per year.

In addition, Premiere Elements 9 addresses the ability to use tapeless workflows—from Flip cameras to D-SLR consumer and pro cameras—a feature that's only recently been added to Adobe's flagship editing tools, Adobe Premiere Pro, as part of the much more expensive Creative Suite 5 software bundle.

Speaking of pricing, that has also dropped for Elements 9 bundles with Amazon reporting the combo pack—Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements—that's pictured below clocking in at $149.00 but with a rebate that drops the price to $119.00 (after waiting for several weeks to receive the mail-in rebate check, of course).

We look forward to testing the two products, on both platforms, to compare the feature sets, before the product release on November 1, 2010. [Update: Adobe's PR reps say that the product is available now, even though Amazon still lists the availability at November 1]

SNAFU - Toast 10 Titanium Pro's Addition Problem

2010-09-18T14:56:00.002-04:00

For Macintosh-based content creators, there aren't many options for Blu-Ray disc creation: Toast 10 Titanium Pro is the least expensive alternative that has an option for Blu-Ray conversion and burning. It clocks in around $110 on Amazon compared to several hundred dollars for Adobe Encore (and a downloadable version of Toast 10 Titanium Pro offered by Amazon is even less expensive).

Yet, for all the Toast goodness we've seen from Roxio over the years, this Blu-Ray version of Toast 10 Titanium is a dud: it can't calculate storage space in any meaningful way.

I found this out the hard way, having chosen the "Blu-Ray Video" setting and then spending 8+ hours digitizing standard-definition (SD) miniDV content into Toast 10 Titanium Pro.

Once my content was all digitized, I let the system choose its own automatic encoding, which yielded a pleasantly spacious additional 777.1 MB left on the theoretical Blu-Ray disc:

Except that's Toast Math, which means it bears no semblance to reality. While the Toast calculation tells the user that only 22.55 GB will be placed on the disc, the reality is that this number already exceeds the amount of space on a single-layer Blu-Ray disc!

How's that? Don't Blu-Ray discs have 25 GB of unformatted space (or 23.31 GB of formatted space)? Yes, gentle reader, you are correct. But in the world of Toast Math, 22.55 GB is greater than 23.31 GB.

To fully understand the equation, you must allow your computer to crunch data—lots of data—for more than 36 hours. At the end of this time, your computer will then generate the following error:

Cross-check the Toast Math: Toast calculates 22.55 GB out to be equal to 23.76 GB. The latter is the amount that Toast says it needs to burn the same disc that started with the original amount of 22.55 GB on disc (and 777.1 MB of free space!)

I thought this was an anomaly, so silly me, I re-ran the same scenario for another 36 hours, and used a different Blu-Ray (BD-RE) writer.

Guess what? Same exact issue.

Then, foolishly, I tried making a stand-alone Toast image (ending in .toast) and burning it via the Copy "Image File" option in Toast 10 Titanium Pro. The .toast file ended up at almost 25 GB, almost 2.75 GB higher than the original Toast calculation of 22.55 GB).

Yet, when I chose "Image File" under Copy, guess what happened? You are right, gentle reader, I received an error telling me that 23.76 GB of disc space was required on the Blu-Ray disc, the exact same amount that Toast 10 Titanium Pro had calculated in error during its initial bad math day (we're now over 100 hours into testing Toast Math).

What about just removing one of the miniDV files from the Toast layout? That seemed like a natural conclusion, but due to Toast's automatic encoding, it's not so simple: rather than just taking away the 3.1 GB +/- for each of the miniDV tapes, Toast 10 Titanium Pro does another round of Toast Math, and comes up with less free space on the Blu-Ray disc than before.

Perhaps I don't understand new math, or Toast Math, but apparently the re-calculation is based on Toast 10 Titanium Pro changing the compression rates to "fit" on to the Blu-Ray disc.

In theory this makes sense, since fewer minutes of video being compressed to the Blu-Ray disc could yield a higher-bitrate-per-minute scenario. But not in Toast Math.

In the world of Toast Math, 1+1 doesn't equal 2, 3 or any standard calculation. It equals Toast Math.

Please, Roxio, teach your program to add before sending it out in to the world!

Systems Integration for the rest of us

2010-06-07T12:09:00.002-04:00

Preparing to attend a show for systems integrators in Las Vegas this week, I spent part of today covering Steve Jobs' WWDC keynote address for StreamingMedia.com.

Read the details on iPhone 4 and my take on Apple's attempt to outgoogle Google with iAd and HTML5 lip service on the streaminedia.com site, but pause first to reflect on these excerpted comments that Jobs made. . . .

"Apple is not just a technology company," said Jobs. "It's the marriage of technology and the humanities that distinguishes Apple."

Echoing sentiment I've heard from Sling's CTO Bhupen Shah, who reminded me years ago that the ease-of-use for compelling products is all about the hardware and software working seamlessly together, Jobs drove the point home using the example of the new iPhone's second camera.

"On iPhone 4, it's not just a front facing camera: it's a front facing camera and 18 months' worth of work to come up with software that you'll never even notice when you want to place a video call," Jobs said.

"It's a complete solution so all of us don't have to be system integrators."

iPhoned

Why Partner? Edgeware and MediaMelon

2010-05-21T12:28:00.001-04:00

As I've been working through partnerships between various professional transcoding and live encoding manufacturers, so that two companies can provide a joint testing solution for both areas of our comparative testing, I've been struck by the continued uptick in joint solutions.

One such joint solution, which I wrote about today for StreamingMedia.com is a combination of edge caching devices and deterministic middleware, with the two partners being Edgeware AB and MediaMelon, Inc., respectively.

You can read the technical descriptions of the joint solution at StreamingMedia.com, but here's a brief overview of the two companies:

Edgeware was formed about 4 years ago by networking and video professionals, who wanted to solve the challenge of addressing next-wave internet traffic. They felt much of the traffic going forward would be video, and they chose to design an appliance with caching ability. Since this first-generation 1U server used solid-state memory and had an FPGA for programming, IPTV was a natural target market. Edgeware's appliance had a Linux derivative with their own home-grown UDP stack and file systems, and Nokia, Alcatel, Siemens all sell the appliance as solutions to large telecoms who want to offer walled-garden IPTV services.

MediaMelon is backed by founder and chairman of Macrovision, with its main office in San Francisco and primary R&D in India. The company's deterministic algorithms, backed by significant viewer experience data, allows MediaMelon to offer its customers - many of which overlap the Edgeware customer base - a set of differentiated service including quality of service for UDP, TCP. MediaMelon, whether through its MediaMelonDirect, for media customers, or its MediaCloud SaaS / hosted solution for telecoms, ISPs and MSOs, leverages real-time viewing quality information and then serves up chunks of streams from a variety of locations across a CDN.

So when Edgeware wanted to move beyond walled-garden IPTV appliances and into the realm of TCP delivery of "web TV" on second-generation appliance, using RTSP and chunks of adaptive bitrate content, the two companies had complementary technologies.

Yet, why did the Edgeware-MediaMelon joint solution make sense for customers and integrators, especially since both companies had a slightly different approach to addressing the joint solution?

"From Edgeware's perspective," said Jon Haley, Edgeware's VP of business development for WebTV and Over the top (OTT)," our VARs and system integrators are seeing huge demand for building out CDNs in local service provider markets and then adding in OTT services. The MediaMelon federated model really is unique, based on the quality metrics from a user's perspective (QoE), and matches nicely with our quality philosophy of pushing content further out into the network via our boxes."

In other words, for markets like Europe, which are highly fragmented due to language and/or incumbent state-run service providers, the joint selling of a federated model couldn't be accomplished just by Edgeware.

"It really is a natural partnership," said Kumar Subramanian, founder and CEO of Media Melon, "making it easier to jointly provide value to service providers who can quickly deploy a full solution of Edgeware boxes along with our SaaS hosted middleware. The value proposition of offering a large footprint due to the federated model is a significant solution to a significant problem."

Test Criteria - Professional Transcoding and Live Encoding comparison testing

2010-05-04T17:48:00.015-04:00

As mentioned yesterday, two additional companies expressed interest in the comparative testing for professional transcoding and live encoding workflow systems: Sorenson and a new player in the space, Octasic (or 8 ASIC).

While neither of the companies has enough of a total solution to compete in this year's testing, both may have solutions in the near- to mid-term that would fill the gaps and allow them to compete during our second annual test, to be held in 2011. That still leaves 13 companies, including Ateme, Envivio, Harmonic, Inlet, Media Excel, Telestream, who are weighing their solutions against the test criteria.

What are the testing criteria? Here's a generic overview of the way Transitions will test the various hardware-software solutions:

1. Transcoding: these tests come first, as a way to establish a baseline of quality, with speed secondary but almost equally important.

Here we'll look at things such as failover, including job completion and workflow steps; ability to transcode a single file to multiple adaptive bitrates.

On the speed side, we'll look at speed to transcode files from M2T (MPEG-2 TS), H.264 and another format back and forth to each of the other formats; whether the solution is capable of simultaneous transcodes; and we'll judge the speed of transcoding multiple files to multiple adaptive bitrates.

Resolutions to transcode to will be: 1080p, 1080i, 720p, several web and mobile rates.

Finally, we'll see the number of concurrent file-based transcodes that can occur, based on three workflows: Real-time, Faster Than Real Time, Real-Time xN

2. Live Encoding: after transcoding, we'll turn the testing criteria on its head and look at what each solution can do within a set period of time - specifically within the confines of live encoding testing.

Both tests will also assess performance, throughput and ease of use in setting up a variety of workflows, taking a holistic approach to pro transcoding and live encoding workflows. For instance, for clustering, we'll look at initial setup (3 total units, plus mgmnt node and 5 total units, plus mgmnt node), replacement of individual node(s) or the management node.

Part of the testing will take place in our lab environment, to allow for a common set of test criteria in a typical workflow. In another part of the testing, we'll jointly assess management, clustering and fail-over response, in your lab or quality control location – recommended, unless you want to ship a hefty rack of gear.

To keep the tests objective but still cover the testing time, a sponsorship model is being used. We've found with large groups of test candidates that a sponsorship with equal amounts paid by each sponsor - so that no one company dominates the report - works best.

That's the model we'll use for these tests, and more details on the approach, as well as examples of previous multi-party tests and test methodologies have been made available on request to all invited companies.

It continues

2010-05-03T17:15:00.002-04:00

Two more companies have expressed interest in being included in the transcoding and live encoding comparison testing: Sorenson and a brand-new company in the space. More on that tomorrow.

Invitations sent out for professional transcoding and live encoding comparison

2010-04-30T22:27:00.002-04:00

As mentioned in yesterday's blog post, a series of email invitations were to be sent out today, highlighting an invitation to a comparative test bed for professional transcoding and live encoding solutions.

The first wave of invitations went out at 2pm Eastern. Response has been solid and immediate, in keeping with the conversations at NAB. Two companies are already signed on, there's a verbal commitment from a third, and strong interest from the two others that have responded.

Invited companies, in alphabetical order, include: Ateme, Elemental, Envivio, Inlet Technologies, Media Excel, Optibase, Ripcode, Telestream, Viewcast. Many of these companies are well-known to workflowed.com readers, but a few have new product offerings that should make testing rather competitive.

The deadline for commitment to testing is May 6, so we'll let you know which companies chose to brave the comparison workflows.

It's Begun - Comparative Test Bed for Live Encoding and Transcoding

2010-04-29T23:46:00.003-04:00

Earlier this week, I wrote an article for StreamingMedia.com entitled "Back to Basics: Hardware Acceleration" in which I discussed the often-misunderstood four areas where hardware acceleration is used for streaming media content: ingest, content creation, output (compression) and playback.

In the article, I mentioned:

Since ingest is the realm of specialized appliances such as Envivio's C4, Inlet's Spinnaker, or Elemental's Live appliance, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on it other than to say I'll be digging into this topic in more depth with the Transitions consulting team-and a few key colleagues-over the next few weeks for an in-depth comparison of select hardware-accelerated live ingest and transcoding boxes.

That time has come.

More than a year ago, I realized that the streaming market, especially the market for professional appliances that did pro-level transcoding and live encoding, was ripe for a comparative study. Through Transitions, the consulting firm I co-founded almost a decade ago, I'd been involved in similar test bed comparisons for videoconferencing. While that project, like this one, was a private venture, it wound up getting a significant amount of press coverage, including NetworkWorld coverage.

While my personal code of writing ethics won't let me craft an article about Streaming Media or any other paid publication about a report Transitions generates, I still thought a comparative study of transcoding and live encoding solutions had merit, so I approached several companies last August about a methodical test bed approach, measuring a combination of speed / quality / ease of use to compare major transcoding and live encoding products against one another.

All were open to the idea, but the timing wasn't right for a variety of reasons. I talked to a few of these same companies - plus a few new ones - at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) show in Las Vegas last week, and all expressed increased interest.

On Monday, I put together a presentation capturing the key thoughts; over the past two days, it's been shown to a few companies, asking for feedback and also suggestions on others who should be invited to join one or both of the tests - the first being transcoding, to establish a quality baseline, and the second being live encoding, to look at speed's effect on overall quality and timeliness of delivery.

What I didn't expect, when I tossed out the ideas this week on CPU, DSP, GPU and other processor types to test, was that I'd get the first two signed contracts before even sending the official invitation out to participant companies.

The invitation is set to be sent out on April 30, and on May 7, the day after invitation commitments are due back to Transitions, we'll be doing the first on-site analysis of a transcoding solution in sunny Portland.

Apparently there's more interest in this than I anticipated. . . .

I'll post the generic test criteria PDF tomorrow, along with the invite list for each test. [Update: the initial invite list has been posted, with scrubbed test criteria to follow, after invited companies have a chance to review the versions sent to each.]

iPad - Dead End for Flash?

2010-04-09T13:49:00.003-04:00

[Update: It's getting ugly, as an Adobe rep responds.]

Between the launch of the iPad, on April 3, and the introduction of Apple's iPhone software version 4, on April 8, a significant amount of buzz was generated about CS5 Flash Professional's role in the iPad ecosystem.

The ability for Flash Pro to generate iPhone "packages" which allow some Flash content to play on the iPhone was first highlighted in October at Adobe MAX 2009 in Los Angeles.

I wrote about this "workaround" at the time, but interest in this topic was fairly low - until the iPad was announced without Flash support.

Between the sans-Flash iPad and the ongoing HTML5 video tag discussion, Apple continued to blow on the embers of its HTML5-CSS-JavaScript preference for iPad and iPhone delivery as the iPad launch date approached.

Based on the hype surrounding this "working around the web" from a Flash-iPad integration standpoint, I wrote another article, positing on how Adobe could make Flash Pro relevant to the larger HTML5 development audience.

This week, the embers being fanned by Apple burst into a full-blown firefight. Apple's iPhone software version 4 has a modified licensing agreement, that states in part:

"Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs."

In other words, Apple's saying it's not how an iPad or iPhone package is compiled but also how it's written. Apple adds an example in its licensing agreement, directly following the portion noted above.

"(e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited)."

Jon Gruber at DaringFireball picked up on this with the title: iPhone Agreement Bans Flash Compiler that lists out a few integrated development environments (IDEs) that may cross the line Apple has drawn in the sand, but he saves the bulk of his blog post for the implications to Adobe:

"Wonder what Adobe does now? CS5 is this close to release and the iPhone compiler is the flagship feature in this version of Flash."

Going to be an interesting week at NAB, with the roll-out of CS5, discussion of the iPad's personal media consumption coup and the clash of the tech titans that is now beyond its flashpoint.

Update: AppleInsider notes that the issue here may be pre-emptive, since it only relates to iPhone software version 4.0, which will ship later this year, and that it also may be intended to address multi-tasking (although combining pre-emptive and multi-tasking in this case would be a misnomer).

DVR usage continues to climb

2009-12-07T16:08:00.001-05:00

A week ago, I wrote an article conjecturing that online video usage drives on-demand DVR usage. Now, according to a Nielsen "Three Screen Report" it does appear that online video growth and DVR usage are tied together:

"DVR and Online Video continue to show solid growth – up 21.1% and 34.9% respectively in time spent from Third Quarter 2008"

Thanks to @AndyBeach for pointing this one out.

Metadata: Certainly Not Boring

2009-11-25T19:08:00.000-05:00

Especially in this interview that Peter Cervieri recorded at last week's Streaming Media West 2009 show.

Peter's interviews for his ScribeMedia.org often focuses on topics that are both timely and somewhat controversial, but metadata often doesn't fit in the latter category, unless you count Peter's triple-X rated title for the interview.

While my slightly-pseudo-Southern accent always reminds me that I talk a bit slower now than I did when I lived in my native New York, Peter did a good job of steering the conversation to cover many of the points from my recent metadata article: Metadata: What You Need to Know (And Why You Need to Know It)

Running time for the interview is 12:29

Perspective: Blame it on video

2009-11-18T09:38:00.001-05:00

"Internet traffic is growing at a compound annual growth rate of 46 percent. Video is the driver. Make no question about that."

Robert Pepper, Cisco
Internet Governance Forum conference

http://www.breitbart.com/article.php?id=CNG.11b0df967c4c85298aa30205bd42846a.01&show_article=1

iPhoned

The Third Wave?

2009-11-06T12:03:00.002-05:00

I'm really starting to find patterns in the technology plays of the various Media and Entertainment (M&E) groups, aligning core streaming delivery of "traditional" CDNs,mobile and telecoms providers against those of traditional broadcast, cable and satellite.

Twice before I've seen reckless attempts at a land-grab. In 97-99, everyone claimed, but no one could do, full-screen (or even consistent quarter-screen) streaming to the desktop. Then, in the 2003-05 timeframe, a land grab was attempted based on technologies that were supposed to work in 97-99 began in earnest after the coders got to go home during the bust cycle of 2000-2003 and really do the coding.

This one's different, and I think the analogy of the wild west is somewhat spot on: if the first two land grabs were earlier speculators and later homesteaders, eking out a living under difficult - and sometimes deadly - circumstances, this new land grab is about the army marching in full-force to subjugate the natives so that the army's settlers can live within newly defined and expanded boundaries.

Like the battles in California or in Texas, this land grab is not about just one army, but multiple armies clashing for the same land. In other words, this land grab is systematic, purposeful and very process oriented. Whether you call it manifest destiny or subjugation (neither of which I use lightly, given my partial American Indian heritage), the end game of this land grab is establishing a presence that spans decades, not year.

And the natives come out on the bad end of the deal, as do many of the speculators and some of the homesteaders. Even a few settlers die in the process.

I see all four of these groups, along with the armies they represent, lining up in formation: starting with the telecoms (remember the article I did a few months back welcoming the big boys?) and then moving into the traditional broadcaster and now the cable providers, these armies have labs to manufacture the stockpiles they need and smoke screens / diversions to use in the meantime.

It'll be quite interesting to see if any of the traditional streaming encoder box companies make it over into these bigger markets, because I'm seeing more and more products based around H.264 and other standards at shows like Supercomm, from companies with no tie to the "streaming industry" as we know it.

A few articles I've written in the past few weeks provide an inkling of where the next few battles may occur:

Cable

Consumer electronics

Mobile Broadcasting

[Update: in early December, I wrote about a battle between two of these armies here.]

Perspective: Addressing Net Neutrality, Bit by Bit

2009-10-28T15:45:00.001-04:00

In a phone interview today for a streamingmedia.com news article, the topic of balancing network neutrality and deep packet inspection (DPI) was broached by Prabakar Sundarrajan, CTO and co-founder of Ankeena Networks (formerly Nokeena Networks).

In announcing a partnership with Juniper Networks for Ankeena's video traffic shaping product, Media Flow Director, the company acknowledges that a partnership with a "big iron" company puts the Ankeena solution at the heart of the network neutrality debate.

In a nutshell, network neutrality, as defined by the FCC's recent policy making decision, seeks to limit what service providers would charge content owners and content viewers for delivering "non-traditional" content such as video and audio.

The intent of network neutrality, then, is to keep the network delivery charges neutral - or blind - to the type of content being delivered. In order for network providers to effectively optimize content that is time-sensitive, however, an optimization with is critical to all video and audio content tbeing delivered in real-time as a stream, it some level of packet inspection and packet shaping is required.

Otherwise, all delivery will still be the mediocre "best effort" that is currently synonymous with jerky, underpowered streaming media.

"Our solutions stay well away from the 'clear bright line' of both network neutrality and user privacy boundaries," said Sundarrajan, "while also addressing the needs of service providers."

How Ankeena can accomplish this, according to Sundarrajan, is via a three-fold approach.

"One way is to offer 'opt in' solutions for ISPs to, in turn, offer to their content owners who want to guarantee they reach customers on a particular ISP," said Sundarrajan. "This solution approach offers a uniform priority transport of packets, while a secondary value-added service - such as our AssureRate service - can also be used by content viewers or content owners."

"A third way," said Sundarrajan, "is for service provider to provide content delivery network (CDN) solutions from their own networks, where they charge the content provider to distribute content on the ISP's network."

This approach, where ISPs become CDNs, has been addressed by JetStream with its VDOx CDN-in-a-box solution for ISPs, but Ankeena's Media Flow Director solution also can work for wireless providers who need to deal with limited spectrum.

"As wireless service providers face limited spectrum and growing demands for video content," said Sundarrajan, "they will look for solutions that provide a way to bandwidth constraints."

Harking back to the example of the Terrayon Cherry Pruner, which was used by cable operators to dynamically limit the quality of particular video channels, Sundarrajan says a similar solution would be beneficial to the wireless service providers.

"Why Terrayon used its technology to allow a single channel's video quality to be lowered, as a way to charge a premium for quality," said Sundarrajan, "I like to think our solution will be more egalitarian, dynamically limiting the bandwidth for every user at key events, such as breaking news, rather than blocking mobile customers from seeing the video or attaching to the mobile network tower at all."

The company has large trials ongoing with 12 potential customers, including telcos, cable MSOs and wireless providers. Ankeena also parters with Citrix on the NetScaler VPX load balancer, and NetApp.

The company says it will be announcing additional features and product enhancements around the time of Streaming Media West, which will be held in San Jose from November 17-19, 2009.

Additional information about Ankeena can be heard as part of a Streaming Media podcast from June 15, 2009.

Perspective: ASTC Mobile DTV standard = CDN disruptor?

2009-10-19T13:04:00.005-04:00

[Update: To read a bit more perspective on this, here's an article I wrote for StreamingMedia.com a few minutes ago]

Returning to the US from StreamingMedia Europe, where I moderated the show's final panel with CDNs discussing HD and scalability, I'm spending the day catching up on news. The most important news I've read today may have a bit of an impact on the Content Delivery Network (CDN) space:

The Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) announced the final tally in member voting for the A/153 Mobile Digital Television (DTV) standard has passed with "overwhelming support" on its first vote.

"This milestone ushers in the new era of digital television broadcasting," said Paul Karpowicz, NAB Television Board Chairman and President of Meredith Broadcast Group, as part of the ATSC press release. "This gives local TV stations and networks new opportunities to reach viewers on the go. This will introduce the power of local broadcasting to a new generation of viewers and provide all-important emergency alert, local news and other programming to consumers across the nation."

The other programming mentioned in the above quote, in my opinion, may lead to a bit of left-field competition between the broadcasters and the CDNs, especially in dense-population markets beyond the US broadcast market.

Over the last two decades, living between the worlds of broadcasting, motion picture, the telcos and streaming, I've learned to track these standards decisions to gauge the true sense of where one industry may overlap another.

Here's one tell about the potential disruptor that this standard allows: it's using the same H.264 and AAC compressions across an IP network, something the Chairman of the ATSC alludes to in his comments.

"The ATSC Mobile DTV standard is flexible and robust, enabling a range of services business models that create new opportunities for broadcasters, device makers and consumers," said ATSC Chairman Glenn Reitmeier. "It is particularly noteworthy that ATSC Mobile utilizes Internet Protocol (IP), which will enable broadcast services to be easily integrated with wireless broadband consumer devices and applications, further reinforcing the significant role of terrestrial television broadcasting in the media landscape for decades to come."

In other words, ATSC gets to put a multicast receiver on a chip and deliver via IP, with enough bandwidth overhead to also do on-demand and progressive download, at least according to the standard draft announced on September 10, 2009, the same date as the IBC international broadcasting show.

This standard may make for some strange alliances between CDNs, wireless providers and others, since this "over-the-air-broadcast" standard can be used to deliver not just live content to massive audiences in the home, in the form of other non-TV devices, but also to deliver on-demand or progressive download content to mobile and handheld devices that may not then need a service agreement with the wireless service provider.

In other words, expect a mixing up of A/153 and DVB and CDN and three-letter broadcasters, the latter of whom had been written off for dead but not have a very decent overlay network to fill in (or supersede) the gaps in wireless coverage.

Workflow: Avatar, New Cameron Movie

2009-10-05T15:42:00.004-04:00

Jon Landau shows off Avatar's Adobe Heritage

Jon Landau, producer from Lightstorm Entertainment, arrived today at the Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles, to talk about the December 18, 2009, release of the 3D movie Avatar.

"We look at 3D as a window in to a world, not a way to make things pop off the screen," said Landau, adding the movie is not about Earth, even though it starts there before movie to the (pun-intended) planet Pandora. "We've wanted to do Avatar from way back at the time we did Titanic but the technology wasn't ready to be the enabler."

Landau said the avatars of the movie are dormant hybrid bodies that contain parts of both human and Pandoran bio-mass, sitting in stasis until a medical procedure moves consciousness in to the avatar from a human. The key hero (or anti-hero, depending on your political view of corporations and mechanized armies) is a wounded Army veteran whose twin brother is set to go to to Pandora to be linked with an avatar, before meeting an untimely death.

While the concept is far-fetched, the never-before-seen clips shown at Adobe MAX bring both the movie concept - and the tools used - in to a whole new light.

Landau talked about how Photoshop, Premiere and After Effects were key to various steps in the workflow.

"This is really about pulling Adobe's tools in to our workflow," said Landau. "There are certain software tools that let you do your job, there are other tools that allow you to do your job better."

Landau provided several examples, including one about the use of After Effects for compositing on the set and off the set.

"We used After Effects, with real-time composting, immediately on the set to show Jim," Landau said, referring to James Cameron, who directed both Titanic and the new Avatar. "WETA would interpret a wide-angle video shot of the actor's faces on frame-by-frame basis, to create Kabuki masks that pasted a 'mask' of the video image on to the CG character."

Workflow SNAFU - Akamai HD Network

2009-09-30T13:06:00.017-04:00

[Updates (4): first HD, then "HD quality" and then silence. The stages of grief (denial, anger, etc) were all at play, but we made it to resolution and acceptance thanks to a key player within Akamai and a dedicated third-party vendor. Details below the original post. Issue resolved.]

For such a simple press conference, there certainly are a number of unanswered questions. I like reporting the news, but every so often a claim is made ("first ever, only, etc") that has to be challenged.

An article I wrote on Tuesday, September 29, for StreamingMedia.com includes a link to an on-demand version of an Akamai press conference that had been streamed live that day (the on-demand version had a much cleaner playback quality than the actual live playback, which can be seen in the screenshot posted here).

Akamai was announcing their Akamai HD Network, hosted by Paul Sagan, CEO, and Tom Leighton, Co-founder and Chief Scientist. I have nothing against Akamai in particular, but unfortunately some of the claims made can't be substantiated.

One in particular struck me as key to the whole press conference. Leighton claimed (from 10 minutes 35 seconds to 10 minutes 58 seconds in the on-demand version)

"Today there's [sic] 50 million homes that have connected gaming consoles - or other devices - that capable of displaying HD video, of getting it and displaying it into the home. Also, there's [sic] 45 million iPhones out there today capable of displaying HD video."

Let's take a look at the facts:

a). No one else has ever claimed that the 1st gen iPhone or even the iPhone 3G is capable of HD playback, which is the only way to get to the 45 million iPhone number.

b) Even the claims that the iPhone 3GS is capable of displaying HD content are conjecture, as Apple does not allow HD playback on the iPhone 3GS (even 480p content can't be played back).

c) While everyone is doing "higher definition" for live streams to desktop Flash and Silverlight players, many are doing HTTP streams, and a few are doing true HD (480, 720, 1080i/p) to these same players, there are a limited number of companies doing true HD live streams via HTTP, which is where Akamai wants to tell its story. None are doing it to the iPhone, however.

The reason I say it is key to the whole press conference is this: if all Akamai is claiming is "higher definition" as its term for HD, there's no story here, since others are doing it. If they're claiming HD for the iPhone, there's a story here but not one they can support.

When I heard that claim about the 45 million HD-capable iPhones, I immediately posted a question on the webcast, which was not read during the live event; I've also written twice to the PR contact, who was helpful with a question about one of the speaker's names, but has also been silent on the misstatement by Leighton.

Oh, and I can't even get the on-demand version of the press conference to play on my iPhone 3GS, as the debugger tags a ton of issues with the iphone.akamai.com page in Safari, although I was able to get it to play on another iPhone 3GS.

[Update, Sep 30, 2pm Eastern: Akamai's press contact has sent a copy of a document called "Akamai HD for iPhone Encoding Best Practices" that states, on page 5, the best practice is to encode at a maximum size of 400x224 and a maximum bit rate of 864 kbps. Which one of these settings qualifies as HD content? You're right if you answered "none of them" as content encoded at this rate / size would be considered unacceptable on the desktop, and further undermines Akamai's claim of its HD network providing content owners with the ability to encode once and play out to multiple platforms / players]

[Update 2, Sep 30, 5pm Eastern: Akamai is now claiming that their clients send HD 'quality' to the iPhone, with the 'quality' being, well, the qualifier. Akamai has promised to send a direct link to an HD stream, but as of yet they have not been able to produce one. Did some more digging on Mr. Leighton's quoted 45 million iPhones and I now can say with certainty that number is also wrong; the iPhone 3GS is the only one capable of above standard-definition playback, and that feature is not even supported by Apple (see main post). There are less than 5 million of these 3GS units in the market, so Mr. Leighton is off by 40 million units. Another data point: the total number of all iPhone sold to date, as of September 30, 2009, according to consensus is less than 33 million, which means more than 85% of all iPhones are either 3G or first generation, which aren't capable of even playing standard-defiinition content at 640x480, let alone aspiring to play HD content at the lowest HD standard of 480p that the 3GS might be able to play one day if Apple allows it (which they currently do not).]

[Update 3, Sep 30, 8pm Eastern: Akamai is now claiming that Tom Leighton meant to include all the iPod touch units when he said 45 million iPhones could play HD content. I was being generous, giving Akamai the benefit of the doubt about the 5 million iPhone 3GS units in the main blog post. I should have said it more plainly: exactly ZERO iPhone or iPod units on the market today are capable of displaying HD content. Akamai then changed course and claimed that its streamed content is considered HD when it starts from an HD source!

I've heard this before: I did a previous article interview where the CDN client told me on the call they were streaming in HD; when I questioned that, the CDN client said "well, we're editing in HD on Final Cut" at which point the CDN representative interrupted and clarified. Like Akamai, they were starting with an HD source, and were claiming HD delivery . Like Akamai, they were streaming to an iPhone. Unlike Akamai, they admitted, when asked about the claim, that interviewee had misspoken. End of story, no mention in the article, other than to say it was edited in HD, but delivered in something lower than HD.

Akamai, on the other hand, says that as long as it's above 700 kbps and starts as an HD source, it can be considered HD. So the house of cards of the iPhone claims in the rollout of the Akamai HD Network rests on HD 'quality' that's below that of today's average standard-definition stream.

To make sure I'd not been projecting on to yesterday's webcast press call a minutia about the HD-capable iPhones, I listened again to Paul Sagan's introduction to the whole webcast. He stated in his prepared remarks: "The era of HD broadband is here. Producers and distributors are starting to offer the highest quality video to their audiences over the Internet. Internet video that matches the television quality consumers are used to watching in their living rooms."

It certainly sounds good, much better than "We take an HD stream and compress the bejesus out of it, and deliver it to you at lower quality than the old standard-definition television that became obsolete earlier this year."]

[Update 4, Oct 16, 2pm Greenwich (London): Akamai's Suzanne Johnson, who will be appearing on my panel at Streaming Media Europe 2009 later today, has confirmed that a more accurate version of Tom Leighton's "45 million iPhones capable of playing HD content" statement should have been stated as this:

"By year's end, as part of the Akamai HD Network, up to 45 million iPhones and iPod touches will be capable of displaying high-quality video encoded from HD source content."

She also stated that Akamai understand that "the iPhone does not display true HD by definition but can offer consumers an HD-like high quality video experience that complements what they get on TV."

Issue resolved.]

Site is up

2009-09-24T06:51:00.001-04:00

Still having an issue with the workflow of images between applications, mainly the desktop app and the online blogging site, but the issue has been identified and a workaround is in place. Having said that, there's no reason not to launch the site itself, in rudimentary form; please check out www.workflowed.com

Workflow SNAFU - Adobe Elements

2009-09-23T07:45:00.000-04:00

Braintrust Digital has an article at Bit of Tech on the new features in Adobe's Elements 8 series (Photoshop Elements for Windows and Macintosh, Premiere Elements for Windows) that were demonstrated during a pre-release conference call on the 21st.

While much has been written today, the Elements 8 launch day, about the features, little has been written about a perplexing workflow snafu: Adobe's decision to forgo Premiere Elements 8 on the Mac platform. So we'll cover it here.

let’s address the missing Element on the Macintosh platform. While Photoshop Elements 8 is a welcome return to the Mac (Elements 7 was a Windows-only program), the fact that Adobe is staking its Elements re-introduction on Photoshop is a bit perplexing for three reasons.

First, Adobe is taking on iPhoto with Photoshop Elements, but ignoring iMovie (the closest equivalent on the Mac to Premiere Elements). This is odd, given the fact that few Mac users complain about the lack of features in iPhoto, and Photoshop Elements only adds a few differentiators, but there have been numerous complaints over the past two years regarding iMovie’s transmogrificaiton to an almost unusable program. In other words, the low-hanging fruit's in a decent low-end video application.

Second, to properly use Elements, Adobe stores content in the Elements Organizer. The company went out of its way to demonstrate how Organizer is equally at home with still images and video clips, even demonstrating the use of video tags on a scene-by-scene basis. The justification for a more robust Organizer was that customer feedback showed that users were shooting both still images and video on their capture devices (eg, disk- or chip-based camcorders, point-and-shoot or even newer D-SLR cameras).

Third, while iPhoto and iMovie have access to the system-wide media library (derived from iTunes, iPhoto and iMovie working together), Organizer is a walled-garden approach to content. This means that any content put into Organizer is available to the Elements programs, but not necessarily available to other programs, such as iPhoto or iMovie.

Adobe’s Photoshop Elements-only approach on the Mac means that Mac users must put their still image content in Organizer while putting their video content into iMovie / iTunes. This intentional splitting of content types across different media libraries means that Mac users of Photoshop Elements must work extra hard to use Organizer to segment content from the combination capture devices mentioned above, and the end result will be an inability to use both types of content between Adobe and non-Adobe programs. In other words, more work for less overall benefit. That’s a value proposition!

Adobe touts Elements as a “complete end-to-end solutions: organize, edit, create, share.” Following the logic, though, not shipping Premiere Elements 8 for the Mac must mean Adobe must feel that don't want a decent video program, that Mac users still segment their still and video capture devices and that Mac users are willing to do more work for less benefit.

It’s almost as if someone forgot to mention to Adobe that the iPhone 3GS has been out for months and has been hugely popular because it shoots both still images and video!

Sadly, a lack of uptake in Photoshop Elements 8 for the Mac, based on Mac users questioning the validity of the walled-garden approach for one type of media, may lead Adobe to the conclusion that the Mac platform is hostile to non-Apple photo or video applications. The conclusion would be wrong, if only because Adobe's current approach is providing less than half a solution to the underlying problem.

IBC Companies of Interest

2009-09-16T16:12:00.004-04:00

Finishing up IBC, the international broadcasting show held in Amsterdam each year. Found a few companies of interest that are related to the digital media and streaming spaces. There were several more, which I'll comment on in more detail in future posts:

Abit Hall 8, stand 8.A28a. Playout automation specialist, Abit Ltd, will show its new, cost effective, ‘compact’ automation system for the first time at IBC this year. The system takes 17 years development knowledge and delivers it in a small platform capable of providing workflow and playout automation for up to three transmission channels.

Accedo Broadband Hall 12 Stand IP621. Provider of interactive content and applications for IPTV and Connected TV. At IBC, Accedo will be launching a range of social media applications, as well as some History Channel-based applications. As well as this they will be presenting new game features, including the world's first Full HD gaming and 3D components using SVG technology.

Advanced Digital Broadcast Hall 5, Stand 5.B48 Advanced Digital Broadcast will show how it is helping its customers to meet the challenges of delivering an enhanced consumer TV experience with linear and on-demand entertainment services across hybrid networks. Operators are challenged to bring together more content from more places, making programs and services easy to find, and presenting multimedia in new and exciting ways. In its booth at IBC, ADB will show a number of demonstrations of how it is enabling television, Internet and personal content to converge and be accessible where consumers enjoy it most: on their flat screen TV. Approximately 70% of ADB’s workforce is dedicated to engineering; developing products across all the digital television technology platforms including cable, Internet Protocol (IP), satellite and terrestrial. The company is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland with its main Research and Development facility in Zielona Gora, Poland and Operations division in Taipei, Taiwan. ADB has local representation in Australia, Italy, Singapore, Spain, the Ukraine, the United States and the United Kingdom.

AmberFin iCR v5 now supports a few additional tools for ingest into Avid systems, including JPEG 2000 (for intermediate mastering format for high quality content such as movies, offering superior image quality with 10 bits of information for each pixel), closed captioning (applies closed captioning seamlessly for US and European broadcast delivery content and conversion), MXF AS02 (includes highly efficient new MXF application designed for streamlined New Media Factory operations and Avid interplay: AmberFin iCR (streamlining the process when working in an AVID editing environment, offering instant interoperability in delivery preparation, freeing up critical edit suites to deliver value for editing workflows).

Broadcast International CE-1000 is designed for IPTV, satellite and Telco service providers and delivers a very cost effective way to solve their bandwidth crisis. It’s a software-based encoder featuring Broadcast International’s highly efficient, fully compliant H.264 codec.

Envivio Hall 1, stand, 1.D72. Envivio's new iLiveTV solution for the Apple iPhone and SilverLiveTV for Microsoft Silverlight. We will also bring you up to date information about ongoing deployments around the world, such as the recent announcement of new Mobile TV service launched by Digita Oy, which is owned by France’s TDF. Finland’s leading distributor of radio and television services, Digita is using Envivio to deliver ten channels of high quality, DVB-H encoded, free-to-air and pay-tv mobile television to be offered by mobile operators in Finland’s top markets.

Ross Video XPression, an all-in-one real-time 3D Character Generator and Motion Graphics System. Fully Unicode compliant directly supporting a wide variety of languages. Developed by a team with a long background as on-air graphics operators, it plays well with industry leading graphics file formats like Photoshop™ and 3D Studio Max™ files to generate a compelling and sophisticated graphic look. XPression offers individual control of up to 7 templates of graphics on a single channel – eliminating the need for costly additional channels and systems. It can accommodate a variety of workflows from fully manual playback stand-alone setups to distributed configurations controlled by custom applications and newsroom systems. This makes XPression the perfect solution for news, production studio and outside broadcast productions.

SatStream – SatStream is Europe's largest bespoke broadcast-standards facility specifically designed for content acquisition from Satellite and broadcast by Streaming via the Internet. SatStream's facilities have been enjoyed by a wide mix of broadcasters, events management, production, and content companies, including Microsoft, Endemol, BBC, CNN, France 24, and Euronews. SatStream recently streamed three Manchester City matches. The matches were part of the Vodacom challenge, a pre-season football event now in its tenth year, hosted in South Africa.

Softron Hall 3 at 3.A48 Multi-channel H.264 recording compliance (MovieRecorder Express) and a new version of MovieRecorder (edit during ingest software tool): MovieRecorder 2.0 supports multiple SD and HD formats, either compressed or uncompressed. It allows video clips being captured to be stored to multiple locations simultaneously. Ingests can be scheduled over time or can be manually triggered. Pro option now allows the capture of proxy clips. These proxy clips are low bit rate versions of the actual material, significantly smaller in size and can be edited in Final Cut Pro. Editing on a proxy file is ideal for use on notebook computers or over local area networks. It also accelerates the rendering process and enables more real time editing. Edit-while-ingest also works with proxy files, which means that you can start editing in Final Cut Pro on your laptop on a Local Area Network, while it’s capturing.

TrustedOpinion social recommendation platform delivers recommendations for any variety of products, services, and content. The company drives consumer confidence by generating personalized recommendations based on the opinions of your network of friends. Since public launch in Feb’07, TrustedOpinion.com has attracted over a million members and is growing. TrustedOpinion is based in San Francisco, CA.

TXT Polymedia Polymedia Live acquires video content and encodes them into multiple output formats; Polymedia Show is the advanced video player combining standard PC player functionalities with those of Polymedia MAM to easily and quickly manage video content, its related advertising inputs together with e-commerce innovative functions. Also, a demonstration of the IBC 2009 Innovation Awards shortlisted project “Smart content repurposing system for Linear & VOD Tv Programmes services” developed for the customer Mediaset, is also available at stand. The project represents a multi-screen approach application that provides Mediaset with a complete workflow enabling efficient video content repurposing in new media.

V4x Hall 2 – Stand 2.B31 V4x Debuts Interactive "Social Radio" Player for the Web and iPhone (including Interactivity, Chat, Quizzes, Contests and Video improve monetization for Radio Streaming Channels). V4x is focused on providing high-quality interactive OnAir Widgets for web and mobile services. Offers webcasters new revenue opportunities through social networking, at the IBC Exhibition held in Amsterdam from September 11-15, 2009. The V4x interactive web player provides a customized interface that extends the user experience, allowing users to fully participate in the streamcast – beyond traditional programming – with interactive widgets like live, moderated chat; quizzes and polls; animated banners, even live in-studio videos or channel events.

Workflow - Trimming and Saving video clips in iPhone 3.1

2009-09-13T11:16:00.000-04:00

For those with the iPhone 3GS, the new iPhone 3.1 software adds a much-requested option to its video recording and trimming capabilities.

Whereas iPhone 3.0 would permanently trim a clip (the "trim original" option) and erase the portions of the clip that were outside of the parameters of the trim bar, which made for some harrying moments if one weren't paying close attention to the trimmed clip, iPhone 3.1 adds a "save as new clip" option that creates a separate file while leaving the original video file intact.

We tested the feature on a 32GB iPhone 3GS, using clips shot both before and after the upgrade to iPhone 3.1, to see what surprises were in store.

First, let's start with trimming. The ability to trim video within the iPhone 3GS window is very intuitive: select either end of the clip and begin to dragging the trim bar towards the center. The bar will turn from gray to yellow to emphasize the fact that you've chosen to trim. Lift a finger and the trim bar stays where you placed it, and the process can then be repeated for the other end of the clip (assuming you want to trim both the beginning and the end of the clip).

Keeping a finger on the trim bar, anywhere other than the beginning or end of the clip, will result in the video automatically lengthening out beyond the end of the screen. Don't be frightened, as this is intentional: the lengthening is Apple's way of allowing fine-tuned trimming, especially handy for long clips that may be trimmed to 10-20% of their original length.

A note for those frustrated users: 9 times out of 10 during our tests, when we chose to start trimming from the in point, the positioning slider was selected instead of the trim bar, due to the fact that they're both in the same location. The 10th time we actually ended up hitting the "camera roll" button. We suggest turning the iPhone sideways, although this still resulted in numerous touches to the positioning slider, so we also suggest starting the trim from the end of the clip, which makes the positioning slider disappear.

Once the clip is trimmed to your liking, choose the yellow "trim" button to access the two saving options. Choose "trim original" to discard all the remaining video (both before and after your trim points) or "save as new clip" to just save a copy of the trimmed portion while leaving the original clip intact.

It's also worth noting that the new clip will be saved with the current time and date, while the "trim original" clips are saved with the original time and date. While this is understandable, it makes using the iPhone 3GS less effective for multi-shot recordings (such as a short film or news reporting) since one has to search for the original and new clips in different areas (especially if iPhoto, Apple's program of choice for importing still images and video clips from the iPhone, has the "auto split events after import" box checked for splitting imports by different dates).

Finally, while we assume this workflow also works for the new iPod nano's video recording capabilities, we've been unable to test with the new nano and don't yet know which version of the iPod software it uses.

Workflow - Aggregate and Export QuickTime Movies in Snow Leopard

2009-09-13T10:43:00.019-04:00

This workflow may be better titled "getting around Apple's QuickTime Player X limitations" in a nod to a recent Bit of Tech review that notes the new version of QuickTime, named QuickTime X and completely rewritten for Intel Macs, is a bit lacking when compared to the Pro options in the old QuickTime Player 7.

In fact, compared to QT Player 7's Pro options, such as aggregating movie clips together (appending a second clip on to the end of another in basic "cuts only" editing) and the extensive list of export options, the QuickTime X player is a step backwards.

Fortunately, for those who upgraded to Snow Leopard (10.6) from the Leopard (10.5) operating system, Apple left QuickTime Player 7 intact, including the Pro version, if Pro was already installed on the old Leopard system. Whether this is an oversight, or a nod to the fact that QuickTime X was shipped too early, the fact that QuickTime Player 7 is still functional is welcome news.

The work-around workflow, then, for aggregating clips and exporting content to more than just an Apple TV, iPhone, iPod or Macintosh computer, is to use QuickTime Player 7 with Pro options.

If you've already upgraded and didn't have Pro installed at the time, you'll need to downgrade to Leopard, or find an alternate paid application, until such a time as Apple chooses to add back the functionality it stripped from QuickTime Player.

The Metaphorically Invincible Armada?

2009-09-12T19:57:00.002-04:00

Today's news from IBC brings an interesting workflow enhancement from Inlet Technologies, the company started by the late Neal Page and his partners.

In this first IBC without Neal in the CEO slot, Inlet has cranked out an enhanced version of its Armada workflow, which was launched at the National Association of Broadcasters' show in mid-2008.

Like the name implies, Armada consists of a grouping of stand-alone products intended to create an invincible gestalt of speed and quality benefits.

Spinnaker, the company's encoding devices, form the core of the live ingest portion of Armada.

Semaphore, the quality control software tool used to identify out-of-range portions of an encoded file, including errors, can also be used to re-encode problem areas.

A third aspect, part of Armada 3, is Inlet's tie-in to the Apple Segmenter, which is necessary to allow adaptive bitrate HTTP streaming to the iPhone, either via WiFi or EDGE/3G. Inlet showcased this integration at Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference (WWDC) back in June and - with Apple's release of Snow Leopard a week ago - the WWDC demonstrations will now be shown at this week's IBC.

We'll post more about Armada enhancements when an overview workflow becomes available.

iPhoned

Workflow - PDF with OCR - NeatWorks 2.1.7 for Mac

2009-09-10T22:48:00.001-04:00

Workflow - Business Productivity - NeatWorks 2.1.7 Mac

A lot has been written recently about the NeatWorks software for Macintosh and its ease of creating PDF documentation of receipts for reimbursement. David Pogue, for instance, in The New York Times gave it rave reviews for its multi-page PDF generation capabilities.

While the program can be used for many more options, such as creating records of receipts, complete with subtotals, sales tax and aggregated totals, the Windows version does a much better job than the Mac version for these tasks. The accuracy (or inaccuracy, to be precise) of the Mac version means that the practical use as a Mac replacement to the Windows version is severely limited for the time being until both applications are brought to parity (more details on this in a separate product review can be found at www.bitoftech.com).

Despite the Mac version's shortcomings, though, we've found it to be a timesaver for some of the simpler scanning-to-PDF processes that we go through for scanning phone bills, receipts and other reimbursements that we don't need a permanent record of. In fact, we've found it cuts out numerous steps for both single- and multi-page PDFs, complete with optical character recognition (OCR) when compared to the built-in solution for Apple Mac desktops and laptops, mainly Image Capture.

The NeatWorks Mobile Scanner (we have the 2008 version to test) can scan both to Image Capture and to NeatWorks.

So the primary question is, can you scan to PDF without opening Neatworks? The short answer is NO, for two reasons.

1. Due to an error in Snow Leopard Image Capture, PDF files scanned with Image Capture and the Neat Mobile Scanner 2008 generate a file that won't open up in Preview or Acrobat Pro, even though QuickLook shows the image.

The files, when opening is attempted in Preview, generate an error message stating:

The file "name.pdf" could not be opened. It may be damaged or use a file format that Preview doesn’t recognize.

In Acrobat Pro, the error message states:

Acrobat could not open 'name.pdf' because it is either not a supported file type or because the file has been damaged (for example, it was sent as an email attachment and wasn't correctly decoded).

To create an Adobe PDF document, go to the source application. Then print the document to Adobe PDF.

2. Acrobat Pro 9.0, another potential timesaving application for scanning to PDF, does not recognize the NeatWorks Mobile 2008 as a valid scanner, eliminating its 2-step process to multi-page scans (and significantly reduced file sizes of more than 66% when compared to both Image Capture and NeatWorks).

Before stepping through the workflows for single- and multi-page PDFs from NeatWorks and Image Capture, it's important to note the button settings on the top of the NeatWorks Mobile 2008 scanner. On the top of the scanner are two buttons, Scan and PDF. These buttons are considered "soft" buttons as they can be reassigned to a variety of options.

For instance, Scan can be assigned to scan in color or black and white, or to scan to PDF in color or black and white. The PDF button can be set for the same PDF settings or to "scan extra page". While this last command would be very helpful for scanning multiple pages directly to PDF, it only works within the NeatWorks database, so to scan a multi-page PDF requires launching NeatWorks, scanning into the database and then exporting to a PDF. A long process, to be sure, with room for improvement, but it still beats the Image Capture workflow by at least four steps.

WORKFLOW 1: Single Page PDF with OCR

WORKFLOW 2: Multi-Page PDF with OCR

A final note about Image Capture and Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6). Snow Leopard's Image Capture is also a bit spotty; while it will scan JP2 (JPEG2000) files, which will open in Preview, the same error message is generated in Acrobat for JP2 files as is generated for PDF files scanned via the NeatWorks Mobile 2008 scanner in Image Capture. We put this down to an Image Capture issue, but further testing will be needed to determine whether Snow Leopard's Image Capture via other scanners result in JP2 and PDF files that Acrobat can open.

Google Purchases On2 - Additional Thoughts

2009-08-05T16:43:00.000-04:00

Post has been moved to http://www.writethinkspeak.com - same date but more appropriate venue.

What is Workflowed?

2009-08-01T20:57:00.000-04:00

Workflowed is an idea that's been a long time coming, but is really nothing more than a series of problems I and my colleagues have had a chance to solve over our years in the digital media industry.

Sometimes we solve them for clients, sometimes for our own personal need and, from time to time, as a challenge from friends and colleagues.

Too often, though, when we solve these problems outside the realm of a client project, we don't take the time to lay out the solution in a user-friendly way. That's the reason for Workflowed: show the problem, the solution(s) and the path between them.

For some workflows, you'll see only a text blog post; for others, when we have the time or feel sharing a more detailed verbal or visual workflow, we'll use workflowed.com to make visuals or additional details available.

Metadata Conundrum, Part 2

2008-03-07T21:02:00.000-05:00

As a continuation from the previous post, which lays out the basic reasoning for the metadata conundrum, we’re going to look at the the multiple points at which metadata is lost.

The first phase of metadata loss - acquisition - is one that has had the most progress in the time from which this information was first presented (1999).

Metadata Conundrum, Part 1

2008-03-02T20:28:00.000-05:00

Back in 1996, I began the quest for the perfect metadata system - one that would track stock or syndicated clips throughout the production and distribution process. By 1999, during consulting work with a client with a compelling need to track metadata across the total production landscape, we prototyped a metadata tracking system that MCI then turned into a media asset management (MAM) service.

The core prototype had a part that was never built into the MCI system - a measurement tool designed to differentiate between stock footage downloaded for introduction into a rough timeline versus content that ends up in the final product.

Consider this scenario that was first proposed in a 1999 white paper.

An independent filmmaker, who is creating short-form content for the web, decides she needs a montage of video clips that show the history of rocket launches. She finds stock or historic content that includes captured German V-1 and V-2 test footage, Goddard’s initial rocket tests, Apollo and Gemini lift-off sequences and several clips of recent shuttle launches and landings.

She likes the footage enough to pull down the “trial” versions (low-resolution and watermarked, of course) but then finds that these versions have key resolution deficiencies and watermarks in places that may limit her FX compositing. As such, to work around both limitations to the creative process, she’s compelled to download (and pay for) higher-resolution files.

After sequencing the FX compositing, she makes a creative decision to pare back the number of clips used. This paring could be done for a variety of reasons: she sees the original resolution on several of the clips isn’t going to allow complex compositing; she finds the sequence needs to be shorter; or she sees the shuttle she’s chosen is one that has been de-commissioned. Regardless of the reason she

At this point, though, she’s already paid for the clips and can’t exactly ask for her money back. The requirement to pre-buy stock content, regardless of whether it’s used or not, severely impacts other portions of the limited indie production, overwhelming an already tenuous production budget.

Sound farfetched? It happens every day in a variety of productions, as old business models meet new business realities.

The old business model of pre-paying for stock footage holds on for good reason: the companies selling stock or historic content can’t accurately track where their content is being used, either in finished timelines / productions or in types of distribution. That’s the essence of the work being done to maintain metadata throughout the production and delivery process.

Why not go with an even older business model - the “honor system” that was part of music production libraries when I was in film school, where music usage was reported by the content creator after the fact? For those of us who used these tools, there was a double penalty: pay for the music library up front and then pay for usage, with uncertain results at best for libraries like DeWolfe as independent content creators didn’t have much control over where their content was shown. The rise of royalty-free music libraries (and the inherent deficiencies of putting the burden of usage tracking ad infinitum on the content creator) deep-sixed the honor system as the proliferation of new venues and distribution models blossomed at the dawn of the Internet era.

Still, the basic problem remains: clips dropped into a non-linear editor’s bin lose about 60% of about of the pertinent metadata; clips then dropped into the timeline lose an additional 20% of metadata; and clips output to a rendered file (or tape) lose 99.999% of metadata about its sub-components.

The use of a manufacturing term to describe clips on the timeline is intended to make this point: video and audio editing / distribution - almost exclusively performed on computers and digital media - has less metadata tracking capability for its subcomponents than the average 2000 model year car rolling off a Detroit assembly line. Even the glass on the car can be traced back to a particular vehicle, assembly line and date of creation. Sheesh!

Additional information regarding acquisition, production and distribution metadata, including additional excerpts from past white papers and reports (as well as the foundation for a new set of white papers) will be posted over the next few weeks.

What Is Up WIth Final Cut 'Native' HDV Capture?

2007-12-13T20:10:00.000-05:00

A recent blog post discussed both Windows and Macintosh workflows to capture and transcode native HDV files.

While options available on both platforms, namely Adobe CS3 Premiere Pro and Canopus Edius Neo (or Pro), there’s one other wildly popular editing tool that claims native HDV that didn’t stand up to the native HDV test.

In the course of testing HDV workflows we put Final Cut Pro 6 through its paces to see if its HDV capture would play nice with programs that expected, well, native HDV support in terms of an .MPG or .M2T extension. Surprising results.

So What’s Up with Final Cut and HDV?

It does capture HDV, but not in the standard .M2T (or even .MPG) extension. Final Cut’s scratch captures are listed as .MOV files and the Movie Inspector in QuickTime shows the footage as HDV1080i60, with the HDV resolution the correct 1400x1080 (1888x1062) and the frame size as 1920x1080, meaning that it is correctly extrapolating the additional lines. So far so good.

But converting Final Cut’s HDV footage (even the scratch footage) in to an .M2T extension isn’t so easy, as Apple apparently is doing something with its HDV files that adds a proprietary twist to the files. Changing the extension to .M2T did absolutely nothing; changing it to .MPG also did nothing, and any extension confused Handbrake enough that the “beach ball hell” kicked in and never stopped.

Another confirmation that the Apple HDV files wasn’t conforming to the HDV MPEG-2 LongGOP spec was the fact that MPEG Streamclip could open it on the machine on which it was captured (ie, a Mac that had Final Cut Pro 6 installed) but opening it on any other Mac with the MPEG-2 Playback Component only yielded a white screen in the MPEG Streamclip window with an audio bar directly across the middle. So the audio would play but nothing else. Oh, and on no Mac would MPEG Streamclip ungrey the option to demux the MPEG-2 file, probably because it wasn’t an MPEG-2 file and therefore not in a native HDV format ;)

Compare this to CS3 Premiere Pro, which output a .MPG file which we changed the name on to a .M2T extension, loaded it up in Handbrake and spit out a .MP4 file, flipped over to MPEG Streamclip and demuxed a .M2V video file and and an AIFF audio file (just as MPEG Streamclip on Windows had done) and then opened the latter the M2V in QuickTime Player, where the audio was automatically linked to it.

Saved that MPEG-2 1440x810 resolution file out as a .MOV (didn’t export, just did a “Save As”) and now had a native HDV and a native MPEG-2 MOV to work from on almost any Flash transcoding system. Oh, and changed the extension of the .M2T back to .MPG and opened it up in Sorenson with no problem at all on a separate Mac machine that didn’t have Premiere or the MPEG-2 Playback Component loaded on it ;)

And don’t get me started on Apple’s Intermediate Codec (AIC) used in iMovie 08 and Final Cut Express 4; this lossy compression isn’t supported by QuickTime for Windows, plus yields additional concatenation issues. Bad move and poor timing as the new Final Cut Express 4, with its price reduced to $199, would be an ideal base-level system feeding up to Final Cut Pro as iMovie 08 feeds into Final Cut Express 4. And Apple can’t say AIC is used because the machines don’t have enough power or storage: FCE and iMovie 08 are both running on Macs more powerful than those that Apple says are the minimum for native HDV editing.

Almost workable on a single platform except for that stupid AIC codec. And no support at all for moving either FCP’s ‘native’ HDV or iMovie and FCE’s AIC files to Windows. I love my Mac and use it for almost every video test I do, but now have to settle for Adobe CS3 Premiere Pro to get true native HDV out of the Mac. Triple ugh.

Working with Native Digital Video Formats - DV

2007-12-10T20:23:00.000-05:00

A companion post to the previous post on HDV native formats and workflows, this one explores DV workflows, which are often much simpler than those of its high-definition cousin.

DV, short for MiniDV, used to be considered a professional format and still is, in many ways. It’s a format, though, that’s used by many more consumers than professionals, thanks to price drops in recent years as HDV and other high-definition and disk-based formats have entered the market.

This post assumes knowledge of the HDV post.

In a blog post last week, I walked through the workflow of capturing raw HDV files and preparing them for transcoding to Flash video formats. Today's post focus on the same workflow for DV.

Before I start, though, an update on the mystery announcement I mentioned: Adobe announced, on December 4, the final configuration and pricing for Flash Media Server 3 (FMS3). With an eye toward streaming and interactive (two-way or multi-way) video, FMS3 is now available in two flavors: the lower-priced, single-box Flash Media Streaming Server and the higher-priced, scaleable Flash Media Interactive Server. Both FMSS and FMIS will be available in January 2008. For more details seehttp://www.streamingmedia.com/article.asp?id=9774 for an article and a companion podcast.

So back to DV; you might remember I’m writing a white paper on Flash Video choices, which includes shooting some clips to compare HDV and DV workflows as well as the perceived qualities of the resultant transcodes to various Flash video codecs. To test workflows, the raw files were captured in their native formats on both Mac and Windows platforms, and then moved the files cross-platform without requiring transcoding to any other video codec.

We talked about this last time, but it bears repeating: why use native formats? Besides the ability to do a bit-for-bit copy, there's also no need to spend additional time transcoding when moving cross-platform, and no surprises when an intermediate codec (like Apple's AIC, which is used for HDV in its iMovie and Final Cut Express products) isn't supported on the other platform. Plus native formats contain a significant amount of helpful metadata that's stripped away when an intermediate codec is used.

DV uses a Motion-JPEG codec, wrappered in a .DV extension, or .AVI or .MOV if you are capturing in QuickTime or on a Windows Type II DV format, respectively).

Methodology

To test DV capture, I used a tape I’d shot for the white paper I’m writing, on which I had recorded both DV and HDV. Every five minutes, a DV recording was interspersed with an HDV recording. In auto-capture mode on most NLE systems, this would result in the auto-capture utility generating an error when it hits the first portion of the tape that had the other format. The NLE tools I used for capture, though, on both the Mac and Windows platform, were chosen because they handily ignored HDV when placed in an DV capture mode. In the DV capture sequence, HDV was rendered as a blank screen, which looks similar to the capture locking up, except the screen's timecode display continues to advance.

Speaking of tools, here’s a list of the overall tools I used for native DV capture, file manipulation and transcoding:

•Canopus Edius Neo (Windows)
•Canopus DV File Converter (Windows)
•iMovie (from iLife 08) (Mac)
•MPEG StreamClip (Mac, Windows)
•Sorenson Squeeze 4.57 (Mac, Windows)
•On2’s FlixPro 8.53 rc3 (Mac, Windows)

After capture, the next step was to immediately attempt a transcode from the captured native format to a one of several video streaming formats, including Flash (On2’s VP6 or Sorenson’s Spark) or H.264, gauging whether the applications were able to understand native DV format extension (.DV) or instead required some form of massaging (but not extra transcoding) to reach a point where a streaming file could be created. No transcodes were attempted from the NLE’s timeline in an attempt to avoid extra renders and the concatenation issues that often plague NLE exports to intermediate files.

Opening the raw file in the transcoding tool worked some times, but other times it didn't work either because of the native file format's original wrapper or the transcoding tool's inability to see particular multiplexing (interleaving) files. Then I needed to do a bit more work so, if a file's extension needed to be changed or a wrapper modified, this was accomplished at the operating system level or through the use of stand-alone software.

DV Capture and file preparation - Windows Workflow

In my previous post, I mentioned that I chose Canopus Edius Neo (the lower-priced cousin of Edius Pro) because its focus is strictly native HDV and DV. The program was adroit at capturing DV clips and ignoring HDV segments of the tape, just as it had ignored DV while capturing HDV. Captures were then broken down into "clip divisions" which corresponded to each time I’d hit the record button to start or stop the recording.

As with the clip divisions for HDV, Neo presents timecode start/stop times in the bin and on the editing timeline, but doesn't carry this over to the naming of clips at the OS level: Windows Explorer are only numbered sequentially - Cap000(001).m2t, Cap000(002).m2t, etc. This failure to correlate file names in any way back to the original tape footage makes manual naming critical for these files before moving to the next step.

The next step, after capturing the clips and renaming them is to close Edius Neo and open another program called Canopus DV File Converter. Canopus' proprietary DV wrapper and extension don't change the DV bit-for-bit content, but the way it interleaves audio and video content does make it nearly impossible to open the files in another program to transcode files to Flash streaming formats.

DV File Converter has one function: convert between Canopus DV format wrapper and other types of DV wrappers, including DV Type I and DV Type II AVI files. All of these formats store the exact same bit for bit copy of the DV video clip, but some of them write the files to disk differently (interleaving audio in different ways, for instance). Focus Enhancements, the company that I think best grasps the vagaries of different DV formats, has a good cross-reference on DV file formats. Some of these files show up at 720x480 while others show up as 640x480 resolution.

The program introduces no quality loss and can save in both Microsoft's DV Type I and Type II wrapper (both in an .AVI extension). As is typical of naming conventions, MSDV Type I is newer (and was used for Movie Maker 2) while MSDV Type II is older and was used in Movie Maker 1. Confused yet? Don't be; just use Type I as that can also be opened in anything that understands QuickTime, whether on the Mac or Windows platforms.

DV File Converter works extremely quickly, rewrappering the Canopus DV files and putting them into the .AVI extension, with no quality loss. The .AVI files can then be used by many transcoding programs on the Windows platform, including Sorenson Squeeze, which uses QuickTime as a portion of its underlying engine.

The files can also be transferred to a Mac and used as is, but a quick note of caution: since the MSDV codec also has its own unique interleaving scheme, don't attempt to change the file extension from .AVI to .DV for either MSDV Type I or Type II. I did tests on both types and was rewarded with digital snow throughout the image, probably due to the need to way audio is interleaved. Fortunately the damage wasn't permanent as I was able to change the extension back to .AVI and the file worked flawlessly again.

DV Capture and File Preparation - Macintosh Workflow

All I can say is that I'm impressed with iMovie 08 (bundled free with new Macs as part of iLife 08). Not only does it do a great job with DV in a native format, it excels in ignoring footage in other formats during capture, just like Canopus' Edius Neo did.

In addition, and to me this is where iMovie 08 really shines, the automatic capture segments everything in the bin (and at the operating system level) by clip name that includes the time (hour;minute;second) of the initial frame of each clip of footage. It’s not the time it was transferred to the computer, which has no bearing on either timecode or the day a segment was recorded; instead, the time stamp is metadata from the video tape itself, and indicates the starting frame of the day and time it was recorded.

This naming convention, coupled with timecode information in the bin, automatic splitting of clips (like Edius Neo) and automatic folder structure creation both in the bin and at the OS level, makes iMovie 08 idealf for that integrates nicely with the OS. And no stupid intermedia codec, such as the AIC I was ranting about in the previous post; these files, output in a .MOV extension, can be used cross platform with no difficulty at all, including no name changes if the transcoding tool is capable of handling QuickTime files.

DV File Preparation - both Mac and Windows

I thought this deserved a separate mention, since it works on both Mac and Windows boxes: MPEG Streamclip, which was discussed in the previous post as a good way to demux (separate) MPEG-2 transport streams into individual elementary streams (separate audio and video files) also has a useful DV feature. One of the options is Export to DV which has its own extra trick: a very good de-interlacer. I've tried it on numerous files and it not only does a good job of deinterlacing DV footage, making it appear sharper as a standalone .DV file, but it also carries that sharpness through into transcodes for Flash video codecs.

On top of that, the file size is reduced in half, thanks to the way MPEG Streamclip handles deinterlacing, but QuickTime views the data rate of the file as if it were the original size. I at first thought my eyes were playing tricks on me, and I would caution additional testing if you're going to use these DV files cross platform or the video is critical, but it's an amazing bit of workI hope the guys at Squared5 (www.squared5.com) can shed light on.

DV Transcoding - Macintosh and Windows

Once you are done capturing and have made any file preparation changes to DV wrappers or file extensions, it's time to transcode the files. MPEG Streamclip can output to On2 VP6 and H.264, but for final clarity, I recommend using On2's FlixPro 2.5 or greater for Flash 8 Video (VP6-E) output and Sorenson Squeeze for all other outputs to Flash (Spark, H.264).

Sorenson Squeeze, one of the premier transcoding tools, with an excellent batch encode setup and a great watch folder capability (it checks a folder for any new files to transcode into one or multiple new streaming files) can access and transcode from an DV file in the .AVI or .MOV or .DV file extension. On2’s Flix Pro can do the same thing and provides On2’s stellar VP6 support (including, soon, VP6-S simple profile for HD 720p files).

Working with Native Digital Video Formats - HDV

2007-12-03T20:44:00.000-05:00

Almost every non-linear editing system has its own quirks, and often handles video file formats very differently, sometimes with surprising and disastrous side effects.

While helpful in terms of speeding up editing workflows by limiting rendering times, a non-standard file capture from a tape-based format such as DV or HDV creates an adverse effect on encoding for streaming; not just after editing, where concatenation often occurs, but even when raw clips captured by an editing system are transcoded to streaming video formats.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I’m writing a white paper on Flash Video choices. In the next week, a few announcements will be made that will have a profound impact on what I’m writing (causing me to both rewrite portions of what I’ve already written as well as re-think the workflow).

Without divulging anything about the announcements (for those, see an upcoming article I’ll write in my contributing editor role at Streaming Media magazine - www.streamingmedia.com - as well as a companion podcast), I’m going to spend some time in this blog post talking about how to pull raw content off both HDV and DV tapes in their respective native formats. I was able to capture and transcode native DV and HDV files, and use the raw files captured on both Mac and Windows platforms on the other platform with a minimum of fuss and extra software. It wasn’t easy, but I’m passing on this helpful information since many of the postings I read on the topic tell only a very small part of the overall encoding and transcoding story.

Why use native formats? Primarily to keep the original footage as close to, well, original as possible. Both HDV and DV are digital formats, so a raw transfer in the video’s native format is no more than a bit-for-bit copy of the video from tape to hard drive. No additional codecs to muck up the original video, no waiting around for video clip rendering, no loss of key metadata that comes with every frame of original video (a pet peeve I’ve worked on since the late 1990s with various levels of success that started with identifying all the lost metadata).

Given the length of the information provided below (I provided what didn't work as well as what worked), I'll cover DV workflows in a subsequent post. For now we'll focus on HDV, which uses MPEG-2 Long Group of Pictures (LongGOP) wrappered in a .M2T exenstion (MPEG-2 Transport Stream, which multiplexes - or muxes - audio and video streams together).

While HDV cameras tout 1920x1080i the video files are, in reality, 1440x1080i with additional lines extrapolated to create a 1920x1080i signal (the lines are added during playback or exporting from an NLE timeline if 1080i files are being exported). Anything captured by an NLE that has other than an .M2T extension will probably have one of two variations on it: extra lines added to the captured video file (to allow for easier 1920x1080 edit workflows) or some form of lossy compression added on top of it.

Methodology

To test HDV and DV capture, I used a tape I’d shot for the white paper I’m writing, on which I had recorded both HDV and DV, with HDV interspersed in five minute segments between DV. In auto-capture mode on most NLE systems, this would result in the auto-capture utility generating an error when it hits the first portion of the tape that had the other format. The NLE tools I used for capture, though, on both the Mac and Windows platform, handily ignored DV when placed in an HDV capture mode and vice-versa).

Speaking of tools, here’s a list of the overall tools I used for native HDV capture, file manipulation and transcoding:

•Canopus Edius Neo (Windows)
•Adobe CS3 Premiere (Mac)
•Apple’s iMovie 08 (Mac - didn’t work)
•Apple’s Final Cut Pro 6 (Mac - didn’t work)
•Handbrake (Mac, Windows)
•MPEG StreamClip (Mac, Windows)
•Sorenson Squeeze 4.57 (Mac, Windows)
•On2’s FlixPro 8.53 rc3 (Mac, Windows)
•QuickTime Alternative 1.81 (important) (Windows)
•QuickTime MPEG-2 Playback Component (Mac)

After capture, I immediately attempted a transcode from the native format to a one of several video streaming formats, including Flash (On2’s VP6 or Sorenson’s Spark) or H.264, gauging whether the applications were able to understand native HDV and DV format extensions (.M2T and .DV) or instead required some form of massaging (but not extra transcoding) to reach a point where a streaming file could be created.

No transcodes were attempted from the NLE’s timeline. This limitation was one part pragmatic (an attempt to avoid extra renders and concatenation issues) and one part self-challenge (to see whether the statement, which I’d seen on several forums, that HDV or DV files couldn’t be used cross platform without rendering was true).

Given the length of these topics, and variations in workflow, I’m going to cover HDV in this post and DV in a subsequent post.

HDV Capture and file preparation - Windows Workflow

If you’re starting out on the Windows platform, a good encoding product that captures raw HDV in its native M2T format is Canopus Edius. This NLE comes in two flavors (Pro and Neo); I chose Neo because its focus is strictly native HDV and DV.

Edius Neo did a good job of ignoring the clips that were DV and capturing only the HDV footage, which it then broke down into clips based on each time I’d hit the record button to start or stop the recording (Canopus calls this “clip divisions”). In the bin and on the editing timeline, Neo presents timecode start/stop times but the same clips in Windows Explorer are only numbered sequentially - Cap000(001).m2t, Cap000(002).m2t, etc. This failure to correlate file names in any way back to the original tape footage makes manual naming critical for these files before moving to the next step.

Now that you have a .M2T file, have closed Edius and renamed the file to an appropriate name that corresponds to timecode or date of the captured tape, you’re done if you only plan to do H.264 or MPEG manipulations from a program like MPEG Streamclip or Handbrake. To find out about these, see theHDV Transcoding section below.

HDV Capture - Macintosh Workflow

Capture of HDV files on a Mac is both more intuitive and more difficult than HDV capture on a Windows machine. More intuitive because the captured footage is named for the time (hour;minute;second) of the initial frame of each clip of footage; and it’s not the time it was transferred to the computer but, rather, the time stamp on the videotape for the starting frame of the day it was captured. This naming convention, coupled with timecode information in the bin, would make the capture of HDV footage on a Mac ideal.

Yet that’s where the frustration comes in to play; the only programs on the Mac that support native HDV editing are the new Adobe CS3 Premiere Pro (a sister product to CS3 Premiere Pro for Windows) and Final Cut Pro 6. Premiere can be purchased as a point product, but Final Cut Pro 6 can only be purchased as part of the Final Cut Studio 2 suite. So you can’t get into native HDV capture, let along editing, on the Mac for less than $600 (or less than $1200 if you buy Final Cut Studio 2 or Adobe’s CS3 Production Premium, the suite that contains Premiere Pro for the Mac). Apple’s lower-end products, such as the simple but great iMovie 08 (version 7) and Final Cut Express 4, both released AFTER Final Cut Pro 6 and running on Macs more powerful than those that Apple says are the minimum for native HDV editing, still are crippled by the Apple Intermediate Codec (AIC) which isn’t supported by QuickTime on the Windows platform. Ugh.

It really is too bad, because iMovie 08 (bundled with new Macs as part of iLife 08) does a great job with DV in a native format, plus it excels in ignoring footage in other formats during capture, plus logging, naming, splitting clips and automatically creating a folder structure that integrates nicely with the OS. Even the new Final Cut Express 4, an ideal base-level system feeding up to Final Cut Pro uses that stupid AIC codec, so no true HDV feeder system exists on the Mac.

Feel the frustration? It has to do with the fact that AIC is a lossy codec; if it were lossless, like Apple’s ProRes422, native HDV capture would be viable.

So, anyway, we captured footage in Apple’s Final Cut Pro 6 which lists native HDV capture as one of its selling points. But, and this is a major but: while you can get HDV content into FCP, getting it out (even the scratch files) is next to impossible. We’ll talk about that below, in its own separate section, as it takes alot of explaining and shows FCP is behind the times on HDV.

So we switched to CS3 Premiere Pro. It worked like a charm and output a lovely .MPG file, which we renamed to .M2T and proceeded with life, just as easily as the Canopus Edius Neo scenario on Windows XP. Premiere lacks the grace of intelligent logging in Edius and Final Cut (all trumped by iMovie 08’s excellent logging). As a Mac program capturing raw HDV transport streams, though, Premiere trounces iMovie, FC Express and FCP.

Once you are done capturing in CS3 Premiere Pro, quit the program and rename the files to match some reference to your original capture and then proceed to transcoding change the extension from .MPG to .M2T. This will give you access to Handbrake and MPEG Streamclip, which you’ll need, respectively, to convert to .MP4 (H.264) and demux the MPEG-2 transport stream to elementary streams, or separate audio and video files. The latter step is required if you want to use native HDV footage in On2’s Flix Pro which doesn’t have native MPEG-2 demux capability.

HDV Transcoding - Windows and Mac Dual Workflow

So what programs work cross-platform for manipulation of raw HDV files? We’ve mentioned three so far: Sorenson Squeeze, MPEG Streamclip and Handbrake. And we’ll add a fourth, which requires a bit of manipulation: On2’s Flix Pro 8.53 rc3 (tested in release candidate 3).

Each of the first two tools can manipulate files with the .M2T extension. Both handle .M2T completely fine, with Handbrake requiring the .M2T extension to work properly (a .MPG yields an invalid file type). MPEG Streamclip using QuickTime Alternative (QTA) on Windows to transcode to many file types or to further demux for use on other programs that can’t handle the .M2T extension; on the Mac, is uses the MPEG-2 Playback Component.

If you’ve not heard of Handbrake, you’re in for a surprise. This open-source, multi-threaded cross-platform program offers an excellent way to generate good 1280x720 H.264 files directly from .M2T files, demuxing both audio and video automatically as it creates and re-muxes H.264 versions of files. Given its heritage - a program designed to rip DVDs into H.264 movie files - it is also very fast, almost 15 times faster than Sorenson Squeeze’s H.264 encodes. It ouptuts a better transcode, too, which is surprising as Sorenson Squeeze uses 5 or more passes to Handbrake’s 2-pass transcoding.

Handbrake is available on Mac and Windows, so .M2T files can be opened and transcoded from directly with no other manipulation. Handbrake’s primary downside, though, appears during multi-file encodings, as it both lacks a watch folder and has the most antiqued batch queueing system I’ve seen in quite some time: every file must be added manually to the queue, even if every file is going to have the exact same manipulation. Given the laborious batch queuing process, plus instability which yielded repeated failures after the 6th transcode in a long batch queue list (failures occurred on several test Mac systems), the encoding speed is mitigated by the need to constantly monitor the software. Once that issue is addressed, though, this is a very good H.264 contender.

MPEG Streamclip is another free program, which requires a free additional tool (QuickTime Alternative) on Windows and a paid additional tool (QuickTime’s MPEG-2 Playback Component) on a Mac; we’ve also found MPEG Streamclip can be used to decode .M2T files on any Mac with Compressor loaded on it. This is a must-have tool.

MPEG Streamclip works quite nicely if you follow the directions closely, especially on Windows machines. The underlying tool required on Windows is called QuickTime Alternative (QTA). MPEG Streamclip requires version 1.81 for its MPEG-2 codecs (newer QTA versions, including the new v2, lack the MPEG-2 codecs found in version 1.81). Adding a newer version of QTA to MPEG Streamclip creates a vicious circle that appears to render the program unusable for our main goal: demuxing .M2T files into separate video and audio files (elementary streams) for use of HDV files in programs such as On2 Flix Pro.

Sorenson Squeeze, one of the premier transcoding tools, with an excellent batch encode setup and a great watch folder capability (it checks a folder for any new files to transcode into one or multiple new streaming files) can access and transcode from a native HDV file file with one simple change: change the file’s .M2T extension to an .MPG extension and Sorenson will demux and use the file to create transcodes in a wide variety of formats. Squeeze has a native MPEG-2 demuxer built right in which means it’s a tool that can be used for almost everything, with the exception of VP6-S - On2’s new simple profile HD-capable version of VP6. If time isn’t a factor, because the product is painfully slow (but not quite as slow as Compressor).

HDV Playback - Windows and Mac

Changing a .M2T file to a .MPG extension allows Windows Media Player (WMP) to play the files with no additional manipulation, even on the expired demo version of the Elecard MPEG-2 WMP decoder. Likewise, QuickTime Alternative 1.81 can use a Classic Media Player to play content on Windows boxes. The player, though, don’t work cross-platform even with .MPG-named files: Windows Media Player, as its name implies, is only available on Windows.

QuickTime on the Mac (even with the $20 MPEG-2 Playback Component) yields a white screen for .MPG files that have been changed from .M2T files. The Mac QuickTime player also balks at .M2T files saying, simply, “This file is not a movie file.” - doubly ironic since the MPEG-2 Playback Component for QuickTime is required for MPEG Streamclip on the Mac to read and demux .M2T files into .M2V video and AIFF audio files which then play fine via QT’s MPEG-2 Playback Component, linking both audio and video files together to play simultaneously, as long as they are named the same (minus extensions, of course) and in the same folder.

Your choice for cross-platform playback? MPEG Streamclip, with the tools mentioned above for each respective platform. At least you didn’t waste $20 on the MPEG-2 Playback Component for QuickTime for Windows ;)

[Note: while the files showed timecode information in the Canopus Neo bin and on Neo editing timeline, the information is lost during the demuxing to .M2V and AIFF via MPEG Streamclip; the same is possibly true with CS3 Premiere files but no testing was done to confirm this scenario.]