Youtube, Flash Video, posting online video, etc.

It's been a long time since I started this blog, and not really a much shorter time since I last posted! I've been (not unreasonably) distracted by buying a house, and my daughter growing up. Since then I have been working on two new film projects. The first is a script I wrote that Ayşegül will direct. It's a comedy set in the world of filmmaking, or rather a slightly daft satire on the world of filmmaking. At the moment we are casting and scouting locations but hope to shoot in June. The second project I will direct, again from my own script. It's a pastiche of old gangster movies, combined with some urban myths.

However I feel I should wrap up with the last entry on the previous film (close to a year after completion). The film "Christmas Present" is now available online here: www.geocities.com/epengin/present.html

The movie is actually hosted by Youtube but we have managed to stream it to Ayşegül's Geocities site using the excellent Flash Video Player by Jeroen Wijering. This allows us much greater control over how the video plays in our website than the Youtube embedded player allows.

For example, we can put a higher quality preview image of our own choice rather than the random image that Youtube chooses, which is of appalling quality (and, in the case of Ayşegül's film, something of a spoiler). The Flash Video Player also allows control of the aspect ratio, and for Flash 9 users, the image can be blown up to true full screen. For "Christmas Present" we shot in 16:9 HDV, but Youtube allows only 320x240 4:3. If you upload other aspect ratios, Youtube's server side software letterboxes the image to maintain the correct ratio (there is a version of "Christmas Present" like this on youtube from an earlier upload). In this case you're only using 320x180 pixels for the actual movie and wasting 25% on black bars.

We uploaded a 4:3 frame with an anamorphic squeeze, which meant that we filled the 4:3 Youtube frame (no letterbox bars) but of course on Youtube our image is out of proportion (see it here). With Mr Wijering's Flash Video player we set can the proper 16:9 proportions for height and width when the flash player is embedded in our website, and so get a much better image quality over all. Widescreen in DVD, DV cameras, Digital broadcast and even HDV cameras works in the same way. Of course quality is still very low compared to some other sites, or hosting you own high quality QT or WMV file, but the advantage is we're using Youtube's bandwidth rather than paying for our own, and Flash video, while not the most modern and efficient codec, has the widest installed base of any video codec (largely because it's used by sites like Youtube).

We bypassed Youtube's embed feature, and found the original location for the Youtube FLV file (there are numerous websites and programmes that help you do this on the net. On Mac OS X, Safari will show you the location of the FLV file under the "activity" window - you might need to add .flv" to the end of the file location though.) It's possible this is a violation of Youtube's terms of service, but it's not one that I would feel too bad about, especially as we've put links by each video directly to the original Youtube page. Anyway I can't find anything in the terms of service that clearly states that we're forbidden from linking to our intellectual property - but then I'm not a lawyer, I don't even play one on TV... [update 6, March 2008: Youtube has recently changed its terms of service to explicitly forbid bypassing Youtube content in this way to avoiding using the branded Youtube player]

Mr Wijering's player is an excellent tool for web video: it also allows other cool features such as subtitles, logo/watermarks, playlisting, alternative audio tracks, chapter markers... I suggest checking it out.

I've been asked by some one the web about getting the best quality out of Youtube, as generally Youtube is seen as offering very poor quality web encoding. Actually this is unfair. It is low resolution. and it is very highly compressed, and there are better codecs out there with superior quality to data-rate ratio. However the poor quality seen in most Youtube postings is because the videos are often "badly" (i.e. for Youtube, unsuitably) shot in the first place. Certain styles of filming, such as hand held camera, fast cutting, transitions and fast moving changing images all stress the Flash Video codec and can cause objectionable artefacts.

While the online version of Ayşegül's film is not artefact free, it does better because, by chance, for this film, she adopted a very restrained, classical style, which she has used in a few of her drama productions. By contrast she has made a documentary on the Dance Music scene in Turkey which we will put online in the near future (after editing a 10 minute version) that uses a more "aggressive" visual style, one which I think will not compress quite as neatly. In that case. we may host the film on Revver, as it does give over a lot more bandwidth (more resolution and lighter compression) to the video streams than Youtube.