Category: ExecProducer & Multimedia

According to this indepth Cnet article “2004 is the last year when people consider video an exotic application for broadband,” (Peter Barrett, CTO Microsoft TV).

So the Baby Bells are spending billions to become TV providers. “Voice is a dying business” and the bites from cable are costly. “If we are going to build the IP (Internet Protocol) pipe, we want all the revenue streams. The great thing is that several technologies are coming together now. We’re very happy about that” (Ralph Ballart, VP Broadband, SBC Laboratories).

The key is services, since most customers already have cable or satellite and are unlikely to change unless service offerings are more compelling. And bandwidth constipation is a real issue when dealing with poorly compressed poorly produced Internet video. “Digital video technology is in flux as technology providers develop potential replacements for the current standard, known as MPEG-2, which would require substantially less bandwidth to transmit video without loss of picture quality. A new standard, known as MPEG-4, would slash bandwidth requirements by about 75 percent, giving TV providers room for additional channels and high-definition transmissions, but it is still largely a work in progress”.

It’s not a “work in progress” at ExecProducer – we’ve been producing media of the Internet, by the Internet, and for the Internet for years, and continue to innovate on end-to-end quality, bandwidth resource allocation, and TCP/IP infrastructure issues along with production issues. So I suppose it’s just a “catch-up game” for those other guys. All aboard!

Michael Bazeley of the SJ Mercury News today takes folks to task for leaving all those digital photos and vids on their disk drive just waiting for it to die. He says people should be putting their personal stuff on other people’s sites (which does help with backup issues). And if you don’t have many photos, and you’re already organized, and you don’t mind transient views, that’s probably a great idea.

But what if you’ve got loads of photos – a lot more than a simple photo album page – and a lot of clips too. If they’re cluttering up a disk drive, surely they’ll clutter up a site. So you become disorganized in two places at once! Well that doesn’t sound too promising…

There’s one more way people can organize their photos (and vid clips). Make a movie with ExecProducer! Here’s how…

“Why is it so hard to just watch a movie?” I hear that a lot from otherwise happy folks who think that installing multimedia on their PCs and Macs means everything should work. But then it doesn’t – not even for SJ Mercury News reporters. Think the reason management brain-damaged the staff PCs is to keep them from watching rival SF Chronicle’s mp4 stash on company time?

As more and more of the industry turns to Internet video, making it difficult for reporters in the press to view it does climb the heights of absurdity. For example, a reporter friend of mine wanted to watch a few of the events videos on the Forum for Women Entrepreneur MinutePitch site with the possibility that he might be able to write a piece on women entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. And that is just grand with me too, since I’m one myself, so I was all ready to help. Actually, I didn’t think it would take much of my time, since lots of women and men have already viewed those little events videos. “It’s a no-brainer” I thought, as long as you have Quicktime 6 or an mp4 player.

So what happened when he tried to watch a simple mp4 video on a web site? In his own words, “You may be underestimating the decrepitude of the Mercury News’ IT and my own understanding thereof…” and hence a merry chase ensued. “After waiting 10 to 15 minutes while [it] downloaded, I clicked on it only to find ‘this document format is invalid or not supported.'” Frustrating! So why can’t our poor reporter watch an FWE vid? The answer may surprise you…

For the drooling photophiles, it’s here – Canon’s New EOS-1Ds Mark II. Full 35mm frame, 16.7 megapixel. Dual digix processors. Dual CF cards. As one excited guy raves “What a honey”. But at $8k, is it worth selling your soul (or your car) for?

Maybe for the budding dermotologist. At 138 lines / mm, you not only see every pore in a facial shot – you can even determine if your subject has bacteria! Wow. Headshots have never been so exciting. And think of the intimate photography one could do as well…

Reminds me of the passage in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Chapter 5 (A Voyage to Brobdingnag) to wit “…very far from being a tempting sight…their skins appeared so coarse and uneven, so variously colored, when I saw them near, with a mole here and there as broad as a trencher, and hairs hanging from it thicker than packthreads.”

Uh, maybe best to use it for astrophotography – but the sizes of the pixels do matter. Are the pixels too small to integrate the light properly, so do you have to bin them together? Do you have to do serious cooling for Johnson noise? These are the mundane but serious issues.

If you’ve got the money, buy one for me and I’ll check it out for you. If you can’t afford it, the new Canon 20D just arrived too. 8.2 megapixel CMOS with state-of-the-art low noise sensor for $1,500. 1.6 crop factor. Out of stock just about everywhere, but only a 4 week waiting list. Just drop Lynne Jolitz a line at my website.

A certain very large software company which prides itself on providing the ultimate enterprise solution in Silicon Valley now wins the “Send it By Messenger – It’s Faster” email award.

A manager at that firm sent an email to a private MinutePitch channel for video production. And then waited…and waited… Where was the movie?

I wanted to know that myself. So I checked the logs and found we hadn’t received any email! What happened to it? As he investigated on his end, we watched and waited, until the email popped in at 1:34pm. He was sent our email after processing and deployment to the site successfully at 1:37pm. So we got it, produced, uploaded, and displayed it. All in about 3 minutes less some odd seconds.

However, we found it took about 2 hours to get the email from his company to here. As my Physics 110B professor used to say when someone was very dullwitted, “Talk about phase lag”!

The moral of the story – before you blame the receipient of the email for blowing you off, maybe you ought to check first with your firewall guardian.

Or as the manager himself put it sheepishly afterwards, “We are the cobblers children”. However, for shoemakers they have pretty ritzy digs.

A news photographer got a bit too close to the demolition of a bridge on the Mississippi. Well actually, he did want to get further away, but his remote setup didn’t work. So he got close in and manually handled the cameras from behind some construction equipment. Not a good idea. The blast knocked him down and destroyed all his equipment, but not the CF card.

Fascinating photos of the bridge and the camera moments after the blast.

Film would have probably been too damaged, as the camera itself was ripped open. But the images survived on a CF card. Anyone want to argue about the hardiness of digital storage now?

I don’t know if anyone else noticed, but not only were the opening ceremonies of the Summer Olympic Games in Athens inspiring as always (I’m a student of Greek myth and legend), but the athletes marching proudly about the Olympic stadium were also using small digital cameras to take photos and clips from their own personal perspective.

What an amazing thing – as 4.5 billion people watched these athletes prepare to compete, they were taking photos and video of each other and us!

Revisiting the Pew Internet study (“Content Creation“) discussing online content creation by Internet users (Mar-May 2003), it’s amusing to see how much things have changed in a year.

According to the Pew study released February of 2004 (and to be fair, the study took one year to assemble, analyze the data and release the report, so it’s understandably a bit outdated) content creators use very little digital media. It’s not popular. Right? Uhh, not anymore.

Look how far we’ve gone. Photo sharing has become far more popular. This is due to two factors – the increasing size of photos (megapixel) precludes easy mailing from person-to-person, but with new photo sites placement on one site offers convenient storage, and now a lot of people can look, when before only a few could. And even better – tools are not required for anyone to use them – it’s simply an upload.

However, video is an entirely different area. I see two different conflicting trends.

Mike Langberg added his two cents into my recent commentary (“Lights, Camera,…No Sergey, the camera is this way!“):

“Lynne: Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Maybe you can offer Google some pointers for any future videos. They could sure use your help.”

Sure thing. I’ve got a camera! I’ll make them look real nice and bright and wholesome. That “shadows” stuff I’ll save for their backers – VC’s love the Brando “Godfather” style, and look alot better with thin ties.

Rob Enderle, industry analyst in his article The Death and Rebirth of the Movie Industry mentions my work at ExecProducer with one of our partners. “Even moving further down-market, a little start-up in Silicon Valley — a firm called Valux has introduced a product, MinutePitch, that allows you to take the raw videos that some cell phones and digital cameras create to produce video marketing collateral and measure the success of that collateral.”

It’s not just camcorders anymore – it’s 3G and Me.