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Jan Ozer

Jan has worked in digital video since 1990, and is the author of 13 books related to video technolgy. Jan currently writes for StreamingMedia.com, Digital Content Producer and EventDV.  In addition to producing seminars and for streamingmedia.com and the MCA-I, Jan instructs two and three day video production seminars for the Digital Media Academy.

Content Posted by Jan Ozer

Exporting the screencam

Screencams are a wonderful tool for demonstrating software operation. In many cases, producing them can almost be a real-time event—you capture and narrate simultaneously, import the result into Camtasia Studio, add titles and such, export the finished file, and move on to the next project.

However, when you’re producing tutorials for a client, or otherwise seeking a more polished look and feel that maximizes the marketing potential of screencams, you may have to take a different approach.This article details how to create a screencam script for maximum impact, how to capture at maximum quality and how to edit your screencam most efficiently in programs like Adobe Premiere Pro.

The Moving Picture: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About H.264 but Were Afraid to Ask

I recently taught an H.264-specific class at Streaming Media East in New York. Though the class was 3 hours long, I can distill a bunch of useful knowledge into this column if you don't mind missing the sample videos and example screens, not to mention the insightful and surprisingly compelling lecture. Click over to the  article for the complete skinny.

 

Peer Review: The Wine Library

This is a peer review of streaming video produced by the Wine Library, written as a sidebar to a feature story by StreamingMedia.com. Here's the intro:

As you’ve read in Troy Dreier's feature, the Wine Library's producer and star, Gary Vaynerchuk, is vocal about not stressing over production values and streaming quality, which is a shame because the producers at Wine Library are definitely leaving some quality on the table——though several options may relate to the technology decisions made by the site’s service providers, not Wine Library. Though the overall score is high, the critical mistakes——in choosing a background, codec selection, and encoding techniques——are so fundamental that they unnecessarily degrade the quality of the entire production. I get Vaynerchuk’s aversion to overproducing the show, but this is like serving a red wine without letting it breathe or a white wine at room temperature. Pay attention to a couple of key details, and quality should improve considerably.

Read the rest of the article, here.

Video tutorial: Understanding the critical H.264 encoding options

This short (under 10-minute) PowerPoint-based tutorial details how to configure the most important H.264 encoding parameters (profiles, levels, entropy encoding and b-frames), discusses why H.264 encoding quality varies by encoding tool and identifies which tools produce the best quality.

Test Drive: Apple Mac Pro, Part 2

906MIL_RevMacPro_open.jpgBack at you with the Apple Mac Pro. In our last segment, I looked at performance. Here, I’ll look at serviceability and the performance of Apple’s RAID option.

In terms of serviceability, Apple dramatically improved access to the system CPUs, though you’ll recall that you can’t add a CPU to a Nehalem-based system. If you buy the system with one CPU, Apple ships a CPU that’s not dual-processor-capable. So the CPUs are easier to replace, but you can’t upgrade from single- to dual-processor configuration.

Test Drive: Apple Mac Pro, Part 1

906MIL_RevMacPro_display.jpgWhen some people get a powerful new computer, they want to produce a new video, play games, or show it off to their friends. I just want to run as many tests as possible to analyze its performance, which I guess means that I’m well suited for this portion of my job description.

Video advertising is more effective than Flash animations or simple images

If you're looking for hard data that proves the effectiveness of video advertising over other rich meda formats, look no further. A new Doubleclick study entitled "The Brand Value of Rich Media and Video Ads" found that rich media ads containing video appeared to increase purchase intent by 1.16%, compared to .26% for those who viewed a simple Flash animation.

I've never been that great at math, but that appears to translate to about a 4.5 times higher chance of selling with video than with Flash. Plus you don't have to deal with all those quirky and cranky Flash animation types (us video folks are just plain nicer). That's my story, anyway, and I'm sticking to it. 

You can read more about the study in the Online Media Daily.

H.264 Royalties: what you need to know

Whenever I speak at industry groups about H.264, and detail the upcoming royalty obligation, some attendees are invariably surprised that using H.264 will generate royalties. Here's what you need to know about H.264 and royalties, in an except from an article that I wrote for StreamingMedia.com.

[Breaking news - On February 3, 2010, MPEG-LA announced a continuation of free pricing for free Internet distribution of H.264 video. Read the release here, and an interview with Larry Horn, MPEG-LA CEO, here.]

Video tutorial: producing H.264 video for Flash Distribution with Sorenson Squeeze

This is the second in a series of video tutorials on producing H.264, in this case detailing how to do so using Sorenson Squeeze.

Video: streaming production: improving your video quality

Here's a 45 minute video on improving streaming video quality from a presentation given by Jan Ozer at Streaming Media East in May, 2009. The video covers common mistakes made by producers in pre-production, encoding and distribution. You can download a PDF file containing the presentation by clicking the "Full Story" link below to visit the web page that contains the video.