So you have just captured all the spots for your new director off of a MiniDV tape, compressed them and are ready to get approval. Your director looks at them and asks, “Why can’t they look like this?” And by this, he means some link to a movie trailer on Apple’s Quicktime site which looks B E A U T I F U L !

So you go back and try to tweak ALL the settings on your software - using the latest codecs, approved variable bit rates, but the output just does not pop the way that “Pirates of the Caribbean” does. Why? Does Apple use some rig equivalent to a racing stock car while you are plugging away with a standard automobile?

First off, let’s talk about encoding. Apple’s encoding capture process is not crazy magic voodoo, it’s just using the best video source and tools available. Apple typically receives the trailer on the best source available - D5. D5 means 10 bit HD video at 1920 x 1080 at 235 MB/s uncompressed, which in English means 10 times more video information and 3 - 4 times larger display than your spot on MiniDV. BIG difference - there is vastly more information to start compressing from, which results in better compression. Arguably, an uncompressed SDI (serial digital interface) Digibeta capture will get you VERY close to D5 output for data rate capture, but your spot will still be 720 x 480 (480p).

If you’ve ever wondered about when to use the contrast balance and image cropping features in Cleaner, you’ve wondered about image pre-processing. Apple has people who can tweak settings to achieve beautiful compression.
Apple uses the same tools - Cleaner 6, CinemaTools, and Compressor. So if a spot is dark and looks great on TVs, maybe it needs a little boost to pop on your iPod. Apple created QuickTime, so they know how to “design” for it. The big question is do you have time to fret over every one of the 30 spots you need to get out for your sales rep by 4?

For compression, Apple uses the same Quicktime Pro or Compressor. No crazy hand tweaked compression program working behind the scenes. No custom hardware cards with DSP magic added to the mix. Just find good variable bit rate settings in the most modern H.264 encoding format. As a result, Apple’s video is only viewable with QuickTime 7, which is MUCH better than Sorenson compressed Quicktime 6 video. Over time, all your ad agency contacts WILL have QuickTime 7 installed on their machines. Our hope is with a little coordination, we can make this happen sooner, rather than later.

Finally, there is delivery. All Apple movie trailers come down to your computer in “progressive download” mode. The easiest way to tell if a video is “progressive” - if you cannot skip to the very end right away, it’s dowloading “progressively”. If you can skip around, it’s “streaming”. If the video is small enough, the trailer will download fast enough to play without stuttering. There’s something important to know here - your website, housed on a single computer farm at one ISP, will have nowhere near the performance of Apple’s download center, which is outsourced to Akamai. Once again, there is a big difference again between a $20 / mo basic hosting plan and a $2000/mo basic Akamai plan - Akamai sends your video files to hundreds (thousands?) of servers all over the world. A visitor in NY will pull down the video from Akamai in NY; London pulls from London, etc. If a visitor from London pulls down your file from Los Angeles, they will wait longer.

For further information on encoding and compression, take a look at our Encoding Guide in our Wiredrive Reference section.

Check back in a few weeks - we will have comparisons of video encoded with different sizes and settings. We are very interested in hearing from you about your experiences with making Quicktimes “good enough”.

We will be in lovely Las Vegas January 22 to 24 for the Digital Signage conference at the Venetian Hotel. What is Digital Signage, you may ask? Video walls, displays in Airports, plasma screens in grocery stores… they are all part of a growing movement to build your own private label TV networks. Digital Signage is almost a cross between TV and the Web, showing video in the middle and information on the edges.

MS has announced a deal to offer for free the Flip4Mac plug-in from Telestream that will allow Mac OS X users to play Windows Media video and audio directly from Apple’s QuickTime Player software.

This is great news, as the WMP experience on Mac has always been sub-par. We recommend everyone download the free plugin from Telestream immediately.

So we’ve made it through 2 big conferences back to back, CES and Macworld. This is the first year we’ve actually cared about Consumer Electronics, largely because of one announcement - Viiv (rhymes with Live) from Intel. What is VIIV and why should you care? Reading through the press releases, Viiv is somewhat unclear but emerging in importance, so we wanted to tackle an explanation.

In a nutshell, Viiv is a platform for entertainment PCs, much as Centrino is a platform for mobile computing. Viiv is a combination of hardware - a processor (core duo) and motherboard - and coordination - including commitments from 110 OEMs (AOL, Dell, DirecTV) and content companies (NBC) to make their multimedia products and content work together inside the home. Clearly, this same equipment will be very useful for professional media making as well.

Viiv computers will easily play back 1080i HD shows in 7.1 sorround sound audio on relatively inexpensive hardware. Viiv will introduce video DRM capabilities, essential for highly sensitive digital dailies for movies.. It will also mean Set Top Boxes (read DirecTV) will work in this mix. In a professional setting, this means that Ad Agency executives will be able review high resolution spots easily in their offices.

Macworld followed CES one week later. Apple introduced the new iMac and MacBook Pro with the same CPU used in the Viiv platform, without using the word Viiv. Many people expected Apple to announce a Mac Mini with a digital media adapter to play nice with the new Intel Chips. What’s interesting here is Intel’s Viiv platform is build around Microsoft’s Windows Media format, where Apple uses Quicktime and Fairplay. So instead of focusing on media consumption (like Intel did the week before) with computers, Steve Jobs talked about media creation with the program iLife. So far, Apple has confined the media consumption to the iPod.

Looks like the Supercomputer propellerheads in San Diego had fun last month reviewing compressed 4k footage delivered from Japan IN REAL TIME over an ultrahigh speed fiber network (250-400 Mbps). 4k footage, btw, is 3840 x 2160 pixel resolution. So far, only 1 movie, Spiderman 2 has been worked on in 4k resolution (by our friends at EFILM), so this stuff is very new. Apparently, Digital Cinema Initiatives, LLC, a consortium of the seven major Hollywood studios is pushing the 4k standard, although it’s a ways off.

My favorite quote - “This experiment emulated a multi-site production digital dailies session scenario, where the cinematographer is on one continent, the colorist on another and the director on his laptop in a screening room in his East Hampton summer house, or in a DI suite in Hollywood.” Yeah - my “state-of-the-art” PowerBook can barely play back 720p without choking and I’m eagerly awaiting a 400 Mbps connection So, think that director is going to sip back a few more Long Island Ice-T’s before THAT scenario pans out…