Google+ and YouTube

Google's changes to YouTube have got many in the YouTube community up in arms. It would appear that Google want to make YouTube a subsidiary of Google+, allowing comments on videos shared on Google+ to appear automatically on YouTube. Furthermore, I noticed that I couldn't comment upon nor "vote up" comments posted by YouTube users on my own videos (I only seem to have the option of deleting them!) whilst I could add my penny's worth to posts automatically coming in from Google+. This may be a temporary glitch, of course, but it came out of the blue and there are many, as I have said, that are unhappy with the new arrangement.

Emma Blackery seems to have summed up the mood amongst the YouTube community. This movie may not be online for much longer for obvious reasons, but I do hope that they let it be. She does swear a bit, though...

Bits and Bytes

This is for the webmasters and website owners, as well as the folk working at ISP call centres, who don't seem to know their bits from their bytes.

A bit is not a byte

I'll repeat, a bit is not a byte. A bit (b) is one binary digit (0 or 1). A byte (B) represents 8 bits. A kilobyte unit is represented as kB and there are 1024 bytes to a kilobyte. There are 1024 kilobytes to a megabyte (MB). Please get it right!

Optimizing Video for YouTube

The Problem

I have a new strategy for optimizing video for YouTube. It's a two-stage process but results in movies that are tiny in terms of file size but look great online and stream effortlessly.

For some time now I've been trying to take into account YouTube's own guidelines for compression from Final Cut Pro (FCP). The resulting files were bloated and with our low-bandwidth "broadband" connection would have meant hours of upload time as well as aborted uploads.

The New Strategy

Recently I started to edit some old footage taken with the Canon XL-1 camera. It's standard definition footage (SD 720x576 pixels) but looks fine when exported from FCP at 1024x768 pixels. When I export I choose NO COMPRESSION. This results in a massive file, of course. The example here, Torre Archirafi at Sunrise, has a duration of 2:14 and the uncompressed export from FCP weighed in at 7.39 GB and a data rate of 473.82 Mbits/s. No worries!

The next step is to open the beast in QuickTime Pro and to export "Movie to MPEG4". Now click on the Options button and choose H264 compression, optimized for streaming, and keyframe "automatic". In this example, the resulting exported file was only 28.82 MB with a data rate of just 1686 kbits/s. And it looks great, even after YouTube have mucked about with it.

Pechakucha

I was recently commissioned to make a movie from a PowerPoint presentation. I'm no big fan of PowerPoint, but the client was Dark Angels, whose website I designed and continue to maintain, and I knew there'd be more to this than met the eye. The title was "Pechakucha", which meant nothing to me at the time so I searched for the term online.

Pechakucha (or Pecha Kucha), meaning "chit chat" in Japanese, is actually a method of presentation developed by two Tokyo-based architects, Mark Dytham and Astrid Klein. You take 20 slides, let each slide run for 20 seconds, and you have a presentation lasting 6 minutes 40 seconds. I've attended much longer presentations. Some were tedious in the extreme, while others have expected me to read lots of text whilst trying to follow the narration, which I've often found exhausting.

The Pechakucha method is a great discipline. Only use your 20 best/most relevant slides and keep your narration short and to the point. Practice and rewrite until you have a punchy and entertaining presentation. I would also recommend the method as a means of showing off holiday snaps. You could easily make a wee holiday movie to upload to YouTube, for example, using only your best 20 snaps.

Here John Simmons presents a superb example of the form. Enjoy!

Sony HDR-CX730E camcorder

Preliminary review

If you're looking for a new camcorder you'll be searching online for the specs and prices, which I did in early December. I realised that new camcorders shoot at an aspect ratio of 16:9 and I actually prefer 4:3, but this was something I'd have to live with (or crop the footage in FCP).

I got the Sony HDR-CX730E from Amazon (£640) and have been testing it ever since. I'm still getting used to its rather fiddly manual operation, but am well impressed with the ease of use and image quality with everything set on automatic.

You simply have to touch the object you want to focus on in the viewfinder/LCD screen (most functions are only available through touching this screen) for the camera to focus on and then track the object. The anti-shake mechanism is superb, as is the wide-angle Carl Zeiss lens.

If you want the full specifications, here's the Sony HDR-CX730E page.

I'd recommend buying a spare battery and a separate charger. The camcorder comes with a mains lead that you have to plug into the camera in order to charge the attached battery, and using the camera to charge the battery is simply wrong to my way of thinking. You'll be needing a memory card to record to as well.

I'll be writing more about this camcorder shortly. In the meantime here are some of the results I've had with it.


Uploaded to YouTube as an mp4 with H264 compression, 1280x720 pixels.


Uploaded to YouTube as an mp4 with H264 compression, 1920x1080 pixels.