It’s a bit of a “catch-up” Friday Roundup this week. Not sure really what happened but this week has just flown by and I missed a few stories last week covering the CyberLink response to Adobe’s Creative Cloud announcement so… let’s get into it!
Codec Wars… again?
First up this week is codec news. Boy, just when you think everything was settled down into a comfy H.264 looking world they start talking about H.265 (HVEC) being just around the corner.
Now Google are understandably pressing for the urgent adoption of their own Vp9 codec and everything seems to be up in the air again.
The short and the short of it is that HVEC is the next generation of compression we will be seeing and it offers greater quality at reduced file sizes. Of course that means computers handling it will be further pressured to perform faster to allow editing of those files.
Google on the other hand have also been developing a new compression called Vp9 and their driving force is the enormous amount of bandwidth that YouTube (which they own) must be using to deliver video on demand.
This all ties in with YouTube wanting to muscle in on the audience currently enjoyed by Pay TV. Read all about it below
- Google Urges Fast Adoption of Vp9 Video Compression
- Google’s New VP9 Codec: Better Video at Half the Bandwidth?
- Will the Google-Supported WebM Open-Source V9 Video Codec Surpass H.265?
“Let the next-gen online video compression wars begin. H.265, the codec that was approved earlier this year as an ITU-T standard and claims to be 50% more efficient than its predecessor H.264, now looks to have some competition in the Google-partnered WebM open-source V9 format, a step up from the highly adopted V8.”
- Cord-Cutting Has Hard Statistics Backing It Up Now
“Pay TV lost 80,000 subscribers in the past year, says a study by Leichtman Research Group. Taking data from 13 cable providers in a 12-month period ending March 31, 2013, this is the first time pay TV has experienced a loss for a four-quarter period.”
Some Handy Video Marketing Tips
“When you have a brick and mortar store you share your business’ personality with each person that walks through your doors. With the Internet it isn’t as simple. You don’t have the opportunity to interact face to face, but you still need customers to see your differences and benefits. Video marketing is a great way to share your unique message online and is a priceless tool for promoting any type of business whether you have a traditional storefront or an online store. With professional video editing software and these handy tips you’ll be on your way to attracting new customers in no time at all.”
PDToots Posts a New PowerDirector Tutorial
“An in depth look at using transitions, tips and how to make them more effective. There are four Video transitions including two Audio transitions:
For Video:
1. Postfix
2. Prefix
3. Cross
4. Overlap
For Audio:
1. Constant Gain
2. Constant Power
This may be confusing for the beginner- but repetition is the key to learning any subject. Once you use and experiment with the transitions a few times it will become easier and second nature.”
Some Helpful Lighting Tips
- Three Professional Ways to Light Faces
“So you’ve probably been told about a three-point lighting technique, and you’ve probably been told how to basically set those up for a video that looks more professional. But there is a way to set up these lights in a slightly different way to make your videos look even more professional. Short lighting, split lighting, and butterfly lighting takes your three-point setup and adjusts the key light to do different things with your subjects’ faces to create a desired mood or look.”
A ScreenFlow 4 Tutorial – Ken Burns Effect
- ScreenFlow 4 How To Use Video Actions To Pan Across A Photo
“OK, this one takes us back to basics. I recently had someone ask how to pan across a photo that’s larger than the canvas size. In ScreenFlow, it’s easy to do with video actions.”
Two Articles on Storytelling in Your Videos
- Storytelling Through Reportage Video Production
“Reportage is traditionally a journalistic term. In this article, I am going to tell you more about what reportage is and about how the reportage genre can be translated into corporate video production, making for great video content that your audiences will thoroughly enjoy.”
“It is an obvious point, but storytelling is how information has been passed from generation to generation since the beginning of time. This includes visual storytelling in the form of pictures on cave walls and verbal storytelling as seen with many of the stories from the New Testament, which survived for decades solely through word of mouth and memory.”
Macro Tips for Video
There are many, many tutorials on the internet for taking macro still images but this is the first one I have found showing macro techniques for video. Macro refers to capturing image of either very small thing or of things taken in an extreme close-up situation.
If done right the results of macro imaging whether still or video can be quite powerful.
Some Video Lighting Tips from muvee
The rule of thumb with amateur photography is “watch the light”. The quality of light differs throughout the day according to the position of the sun. The relative position of the sun in the sky also changes throughout the year.
Some Audio Tips from WebVideoCrew
- How to Set Up a Lavalier Mic to Record to a Camera
“No matter how beautiful the food presentation is, if the dish tastes bad, people will never want to try it again or recommend it. Quite similarly, no matter how beautiful your video is, if its accompanying audio is filled with noise, is too soft, or is too loud, it will still end up ruining your production and people will opt to avoid it instead of share it. “
Simple Video “Tricks.”
If you look at most video productions you will realize that the key to success is not faithfully reproducing “what happened.”
The key is to “represent accurately” what happened and to do this we as videographers use a range of techniques to convey a sense of what happened rather than exactly what happened… did that make any sense at all?
“Are you guiding the brain on a relaxed tour for the duration of your video, or do you test your viewers with juxtapositions, jump cuts, and obtuse compositions?”
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