Streaming Learning Center

If you're looking for the highest quality H.264 output, and encode on the Apple platform, you should try the x264Encoder encoder, which you can download here. This article contains comparison images and downloadable files to accompany my comparison review for Digital Content Producer (like to come).

I gave a talk at StreamingMedia East in New York City earlier this month to a group of business executives assembled by California-based webcasting solution provider MediaPlatform. I was told that the execs were interested in "future directions of online video," so I put together a talk entitled "In Your Chair, I'd Be Asking Myself ..." The talk covered three main questions, Is my video competitive?, Am I reaching all my target viewers?, and Am I investing wisely? Click above to read the article.

Here's the PDF from a course on Streaming Production that I taught at StreamingMedia East. Here's the agenda.

Includes the handout from my session at StreamingMedia East

I didn't vote for George Bush in his second term; truth be told, I wasn't that keen on him his first term, but found him better than the alternative. But despite this opinion, I never felt it fair to blame him for all the awful events that happened on his watch. The Crash of 2000, Katrina, Enron, MCI, the sub-prime mess, 9/11, I'm sure I'm missing a few. Sure, they happened while he was president, but the seeds for all these events were planted long before he got to the White House. He just turned out to be the unluckiest president ever.

Now, I'm starting to get the same feeling about how some very vocal computer users are starting to criticize Flash. Slow performance? Must be Flash. Instability? Flash. Slow to load a web page? Gotta be Flash. Fan whirring? Flash.

For more, click to the main article.

One of the tricks to speedy encoding with Sorenson Squeeze is to open multiple instances of the program and encode in parallel, which you could do on the Mac and in Windows through version 5.x. When I tested this with version 6, however, it no longer worked on the Mac. I pinged Sorenson months ago about the issue and only recently heard back with a fix for the problem. Click over to the main article to learn the secret.

Lisa Larson-Kelly and Jan Ozer will host the Streaming Production and Flash Delivery Workshop on March 23, 2010, at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City. The workshop will feature two tracks, Streaming Production and Flash Delivery, each comprised of two ½ day courses.

The workshop courses detail the complete streaming production and delivery workflow, from set design to Flash Media Server setup, from H.264 encoding to Flash Player creation. The instructors are recognized authors, experienced producers and frequent speakers at industry workshops hosted by organizations like Streamingmedia.com and the MCA-I.

Early bird pricing is $170 for any ½ day course, or $300 for the full day. For more information or to sign up, visit http://streamingflash.eventbrite.com.

I just spent about a month with the Canon EOS 7D, specifically to evaluate its HD video shooting capabilities. The results were very impressive, with amazing depth of field, and relatively low noise in low light situations. You can read my review here.

Click over to the article to see some of the sample videos I shot with the 7D.