Here's a video I produced for OnlineVideo.net on using Premiere Pro's Ultra Key and Garbage Matte. It's an intro- to mid-level video that applies the effect on three videos of varying complexity. The good news? One video is of a (fully clothed) lovely dancing lady. The bad news? The lady's face is not showing (those pesky permission issues) and the other videos are of me.

All joking aside, if you've never used Premiere Pro's Ultra key and you plan to do so in the near term, the tutorial is worth a look.

I produce lots screencams, and some customers ask for a live greenscreen video intro in front of the screencam. "What's the harm," they ask? "It's only 30 seconds of video, how long will that take to shoot?" Well, if you're like me and you don't have a dedicated studio and staff for such productions, they can take awhile.

If fact, this week I had to shoot two video intros, and it took 3 hours to produce them. So, just to have ammunition for higher fees next time, I figured I would detail the gear I had to setup and configure to get the job done. As an incentive (har, har), those who stick around to read the story will also get a look at the final video.

Depending upon your encoding tool, you may have access to a checkbox or number box that controls something called IDR frames. What are these creatures and what is their significance? More imporantantly, what's the optimal setting? Well, let's just say that if you're seeing anything like the random blockiness in the picture below when you drag the playhead back and forth within your video, (click the figure to see it at full resolution in a separate window), you're probably using the wrong value.

Read on and I'll tell you why and identify the correct value.

I was noodling around in Compressor 4's presets, and noticed the presets for HTTP Live Streaming. "Hmmm," I thought, "I wonder if Apple chunks the files and creates the required manifest files?" (Didn't in my tests). Then I pondered, "I wonder if Apple's presets match their recommendations in Technical Note TN2224?" So, I opened all the presets, recorded their encoding parameters and compared them to the Tech Note. That's when things got interesting and I found (what I think are) errors in two of the presets.

...is NOT how they encode their video. But, they do a lot of other things right with their streaming video as you can read below. 

GoDaddy.com aggressively advertises videos on television to convince you to visit their web site. With celebrities Danica Patrick and Jillian Michaels on board, it’s a pretty good strategy. Of course, when most viewers see these TV commercials, they probably wonder how it ends, and how close the two beauties come to baring all. Me? I wonder how Go Daddy is encoding their video and how social media-savvy they are when it comes to their player.