Toolbox: How to put high quality videos online.

Travis Roy (producer of "Valley Homegrown") inspired this post a week or so ago when he emailed the station to let us know he had come up with a new way to upload really spiffy looking video to Youtube.com. Check it out here! His method, unfortunately, is a little cumbersome.

However, Elijah Rottenberg (one of Travis' camera operators and a producer in his own right) emailed in with some more straightforward advice. Elijah uses "h.264 (but I'm on a mac). Restricting the bit rate to like 850 or 980 kbits/sec will keep the ending file size way smaller - but it takes a lot longer to compress. You can also mess with the frame sizes - the best advice is to have people experiment by compressing files that are around 10 seconds long till you find something that looks right, then do the whole file - you can also use those test files as a check on the quality on youtube as well before you devote your whole afternoon to compressing and uploading something that may not be right."

Garry Longe (President of GCTV's Board of Directors and an Instructional Media Specialist at GCC) has a slightly different take on the matter. "Experimenting aside there seems to be no one answer for web video. Depends a lot on what and how its shot and who you are trying to deliver to. We have a number of media servers and they all like it a little different. Note that You-Tube recommends you upload MPEG4 but delivers as a flash file after the conversion??? Working on Premier 2.0 and CS-4
on Windows seems okay to me as I haven't had any major issues although I am making a master rendered out file first before rendering to any other distribution formats."

What do you think? Do you have a method that works really well for you and gives you a high quality product online? Let us know, and continue this discussion, by commenting on this blog post. This is a great opportunity for all of our producers to share their experience with each other.

Joel Stroetzel of Killswitch Engage at GCTV tonight!

This just in from Homegrown producer Travis Roy: Joel Stroetzel of Killswitch Engage will be joining Mark Schwaber and
Sara Gomes to perform an acoustic set tonight on Homegrown. We don't
get genuine rock stars in the studio that often, so please pass the
word along to any hard rock fans you may know.

Join us at 6:45PM (Homegrown goes out live at 7PM) in our studio (393 Main Street, 3rd Floor).