Dr Horrible's Sing Along Blog.

A couple of weeks ago, Joss Whedon released his superhero musical "Dr Horrible's Sing A Long Blog" on the internet. The 45 minute show (actually three 15 minute episodes) was notable for a number of reasons.

1. It's high quality content. Maybe not up to the standard of Whedon's work for movies and TV, but certainly stronger than a lot of online content. While it makes reference to its online status (i.e. the self conscious to camera video blogologues), it could probably be shown on TV without noticing the low budget too much, though it's very obviously shot on an unused and underpopulated Hollywood studio backlot.

2. It doesn't fit the expected webvideo formula. It's long for a short film. (received 'Net wisdom, your video should be 5 minutes or less, ten if you've got REALLY compelling content).

3. It's a hit. This is helped by the fact that Whedon has a peculiarly big and supportive fanbase (for a TV writer/producer). It's not clear how many people have watched the show so far but the numbers in are that it's being watched by millions. there are already paid for downloads and there will soon be a DVD available and even if it sells only tens of thousands, Whedon will recoup his small (low six figures of below six figures, depending where you read) investment.

4. It's by Hollywood pros but it's an independent production. Whedon paid for it himself. This is not a studio or production company side project, a la Quarterlife or the All For Nots, and it's not some small wannabes using the 'net to break into the mainstream Lonelygirl15 or Four Eyed Monsters style (or say someone trying to forge a presence from the ground up in the new medium, like Ze Frank. It's also not some faded star propping up his career in the new medium (e.g. Weird Al Yankovic), This is the writer producer of Buffy, with a new TV show due out in the autumn.

The most interesting thing is that Whedon felt able to go directly to the internet as a distribution source. While in the past, the net would have been used to promote the DVD, TV i=or movie release, as whedon did himself by making the first 10 minutes of Serenity available online for free.

Originally Dr. Horrible... was streamed for free for just a few days before being released on iTunes. Subsequently it was released on Hulu again with adverts, apparently, though they didn't appearing on my stream, maybe ads were US only. The Hulu time stretched, first they said a week, then four months. [update, it's now been withdrawn from international viewing]

Anyway this project could open up for more adventurous projects on the 'net. While we're way past the point where studios, producers and creators take the internet as a platform seriously (after all that's what the WGA strike was about this year) but not audiences, beyond porn and virals. This is the show that could change that.

Youtube Screening room

Youtube have launched the Youtube Screening Room in order to promote short films to their huge global audience. The idea is to provide a more organised selective page where high quality (i.e. professionally produced) short films can be viewed. It's sort of backwards from what iFilm and Atom films did a few years back, those sites have now moved over to be based around User Generated content, while Youtube seems to be moving more towards producer made creative content.

These films always appear with the permission and involvement of the filmmakers, so be sure to rate, share and leave comments. This is your chance to not only watch great films from all corners of the globe, but also to converse with the filmmakers behind them. from ytscreeningroom.googlepages.com/home

Not that good a chance - I left a comment under the film Our Time Is Up and it got deleted, then the whole film was removed and reposted! Strange. Could it be my comment that it bore an great similarity to film by a friend of mine have annoyed someone?

While the majority of these films have played at international film festivals, occasionally you’ll find films that have never before screened for wide audiences.
from ytscreeningroom.googlepages.com/home

Actually the four films up there at the moment are all professionally produced, and the first film to be featured, the affore mentioned Our Time Is Up is directed by a Hollywood TV writer Rob Pearlstein, stars Kevin Pollack and Jorge Garcia (Hurley from Lost) and was nominated for an Academy Award (the New York Times described it as "an attempt to wring comedy from psychiatrist-couch clichés", it lost to Martin McDonagh's Six Shooter); another film was written by American indie darling Miranda July and stars John C Reilly.

Youtube encourage filmmakers, to propose submissions already online at youtube as long as the film is wholly owned by the filmmaker or distributor, to ytscreeningroom@youtube.com

Off topic.

An excellent video here, found via the Radiohead blog. It comes with a personal recommendation from band members Colin and Jonny. It's a remix of the song Nude from the new Radiohead album that appears to be played entirely with preprogrammed technology. Whether it's "for real" (what ever that could mean in this context) I'm not sure, but the effect is fantastic.


Big Ideas (don't get any) from James Houston on Vimeo.

Demystifying camera specs,view in online flash

FreshDV has been given permission to host the Panavision/Canon talk I mentioned earlier. The films are lower (but still good) inline flash movies you can easily watch in your browser. Some of the detail if the powerpoint presentations is lost but it's still worth a look

 Watch online here. The first five videos are online, the next two to follow later this week.

DimP - Directly manipulate video.

I don't know what it's for but it looks cool.

Walter Murch on editing, continued.

The final parts of the Walter Murch interview I featured before are now online. Murch continues to discusses his move from film to NLE editing, particularly his early experience with Avid systems, to his decisions to move from the industry standard Avid, to adopt Final Cut Pro for all his films so far since Cold Mountain (his next film, he maintains, will be edited on FCP).

Part 4

Part 5

Walter Murch on the History of Editing

A fascinating interview: apparently, film editing was invented in Brighton, and non-linear hard disc based computer editing was in use in 1969!

Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3

I love the sound of his still image gallery database, a frame selected from every set up taken in the film, and then printed out, while also stored in a database and cross referenced to other edit log notes (you can see this in use in the documentary The Cutting Edge.) Someone needs to add this feature to Final Cut Pro or Avid, and SOON! How about a tool that allows you to output poster frames from QuickTime to iPhoto (soon to be on PC too), where you could then send them off to be printed by your local photo developing company of choice.

Daily Motion, another HD video sharing site.

Whoops. this one slipped past me: www.dailymotion.com, a French video sharing site (don't worry the site is in English) is also now offering HD video sharing. You need to get registered as a "MotionMaker" but you do this simply by uploading an original piece of work and labelling as creative content. Once you're approved you get to have 720p video (up to 25fps) and unlimited time and file size uploads (Normal users are limited to 250MB or 20 minutes per movie)

It's easy. I uploaded Lenny's Luck, labeled it "creative content". Within two hours I'd been given MotionMaker status. Very flattering, - the video has since been removed. Based on a quick comparison, I couldn't see any difference between the picture quality of the online file from Vimeo or Daily Motion (both encoded from the same source file), the files are both 1280x720 On2 VP6 with stereo 44.1 MP3 stereo sound at about 840Kb/s; sharpness, brightness, gamma and colour all seemed identical.

Of course Vimeo still offers a couple of other sweeteners that separate it, such as the ability to download the full quality original source file and the option to swap out the movie with a newer updated version (something that's happened to Lenny's Luck a few times!).

Update: Tuesday 8. April 08 - actually after a bit of playing, Dailymotion is beginning to sneak in a couple of extra plusses. Its embedded player is HD capable, whereas with Vimeo you need to go to the Vimeo site to see content in HD, and I'm finding on older hardware (such as my 2 year old iMac PPC G5) that the Dailymotion video plays at a much better frame rate - at 24p, on my G5 Dailymotion is dropping a frame or so a second, whereas on Vimeo 24p plays consistently at about 12fps. However, faster moving material, such as the (dreadful) Wanted trailer that's been hosted in HD drops a LOT more frames on that computer, so your milage may vary.

I still much prefer Vimeo's site design. It definitely gives a feel that the site, and the movie's page is about YOUR movie, wheras Dailymotion has a definite youtube-esque/viral video/"hey there's a ton of other crap you could surf to right now" vibe to it.

2nd Update: Friday 11. April - scratch that frame rate advantage. Dailymotion are now running extremely intrusive animated Flash adverts on the movie pages (Vimeo already ran flash ads on movie pages but farther down the page rather than right next to your film). This means a major performance drop for HD and even some SD material. At least Youtube shares advertising revenue with users if it posts ads on your page (which it only does in agreement with the user) or Vimeo posts ads but leaves your page free of links to other films.

H.264 HD flash demos

Some extraordinary results for flash using the H.264 codec can be seen on this page. Double click the image for it to play in full screen. 

The encoding was done by Fabio Sonnati (his English language blog is here) and he gets a 1280x 720 version of the trailer for  the Sigur Rós concert/tour film Heima into a 500kb/s stream. To put that in context, Youtube's older .flv streams are usually at about 200-250kb/s at 320x240. So at just over twice the bandwidth, Mr Sonnati has managed to cram 12 times the image!

Now there are a few caveats. 

• The Heima footage is very compression friendly: clean, grainless images, largely still frames or slow pans with little fast cutting and almost no fades or dissolves. Faster cutting, grainer footage or more movement (especially hand-held) would look much worse. (I posted before about how to get Youtube or web video in general to look better and Heima it seems follows almost all those rules - it still looks GREAT in HD though.)
  
• This was hand crafted compression. On his blog S. Sonnati explains that he worked very hard and carefully optimised the settings for the footage at hand. This wasn't a pre-baked server side formula as used by Youtube/Vimeo et al.
  
• Despite the above, severe compression artefacts are very clearly visible on the footage, expecially in mid range detail, high frequency/contrasty detail shows up quite clearly but slightly softer textures and backgrounds quite obviously suffer at this extraordinarily low bit rate, and smooth gradients (such as skies and clouds) have noticeable quantizations blocks in them.
  

Still, let me just say that again, 720 HD at 500kb/s. The entire four minute video is only 15MB! 

S. Sonnati reckons "generic" 720p footage  (so a bit more aggressive, but not The Bourne Ultimatum or 24) would look OK at about 1 Mb/s and above (i.e. 2 times the data rate here) for similar results, 1080p would look OK at 2Mb/s and above.

By comparison, FFmpegX recommends 2.5 Mb/s for 720p and 5.8 at 1080p (assuming 24fps) if using all the features, encodes can be a little more efficient than that. Apple trailers in H.264 run at about 5MB for 720p  and 8-10MB for 1080p.

There are more examples at www.lithium.it/fvf/demoH264/demo.html, including a 1.5 Mb/s 1080p version of the Heima trailer, the far more visually aggressive trailer for a Nine Inch Nails concert film (1080p 2Mb/s), as well as some very sedate 720p BBC wildlife footage encoded at slightly higher bit rates. Be warned, you need a fairly powerful computer to watch the footage at their full frame rates (they work OK for me well on an 2Ghz intel core duo iMac with 2GB of ram) and the server they on doesn't really have enough bandwidth and there is a lot of buffering on the higher bandwidth videos.

Open TV Network and KlickTab

For independent producers looking to distribute their films via Apple's iTunes, there has always been a barrier. Apple's attitude has been something along the lines of "We'll sell the products of the major distributors but independent producers will have to give their's away free."

However it is possible to get podcasts into iTunes, and this company Open TV Network has developed a technology called Klick Tab which allows you to sell video through the iTunes interface. You're NOT selling video through the the iTunes store, so customers need to sign up with Open TV network first, and hand credit card info over to them. Open TV Network then takes a 15% commission from all sales.

Basically it's a way of monetising RSS podcast subscriptions.

Higher quality Youtube?

[update: It's working again!]

Seems there is a hack to get better quality out of Youtube!

add "&fmt=18" or "&fmt=6" to the end of the URL you of the vid you're watching and see the improvement in quality (tis doesn't work for ALL videos, some obviously haven't been re-encoded yet).

Below is an example, a project by some of my students.

Normal Youtube video is encoded as FLV (OnVP6) 320 × 240, 200 kbps, Audio mono, 22.05 kHz, 61 kbps

The higher quality video is encoded as MP4 (H.264), 480 × 360, 400 kbps, audio is stereo, 44.1 kHz, 118 kbps

So better resolution, better datarate, better codec, better audio.

However at present you can't embed the H.264 versions.

[UPDATE: On Thursday 6th March 2007. The "feature" seemed to have been disable. However by friday it is working again!]

Stage6 to shut down.

I found this story via the excellent cinematech.blogspot.com. DivX Inc. the company being the DivX codec is to shut down its video sharing site Stage6. DivX Inc. have made their own announcement on the Stage6 blog but there is a great deal of difficulty getting the link to work right now (possibly the server is overwhelmed with irate Stage6 users) but the link is http://www.stage6.com/blog/108/

Stage6's problem was that it allowed users to set their own parameters (that and needing to install it's own dedicated plug in). That meant uploaders could push the quality settings off the scale in order to preserve as much quality of the original as possible. However viewers would spend most of their time watching a "buffering" logo.

Say what you like about Youtube (or Vimeo, BlipTV or Veoh, etc), the compromises they impose are designed to give the viewers a hassle free experience - "Give me convenience or give me death" as the Dead Kennedy's said...

Stage6 had the potential to be a great service, and I get the feeling that as company in general, DivX are on the side of the angels (well, at least on the side of content creators) but I'm not surprised it's being switched off...

BBC to sell programmes through iTunes.

The BBC selling TV episodes via the Apple iTunes store right now. Hit series such as Torchwood, Little Britain and the first episode of current series Ashes to Ashes are already up.

Episodes are a rather steep  £1.89 each, or you can buy a whole season at some kind of discount (following the US model). Series 1 of Life on Mars would set you back £13.99. Mind you that's at a low  640*360 resolution with normal stereo sound, and no extras. You can get the DVD box set (i.e much higher quality image , 5.1 sound with the usual specious features) from Amazon for only another £2.

 It's a good idea, one that the BBC should have got into a long time ago, though now the BBC's own iPlayer seems to render the idea obsolete (the strategy of releasing shows on iTunes eight days is even specifically designed not to clash with iPlayer's seven day's for free policy) . The US iTunes store has thrived on selling episodes of the longer running TV series in the states where people have missed episodes and wanted to catch up. (which is why Lost was such a big iTunes hit). 

One wonders why the BBC would go down this route after launching the iPlayer.  One thing it does do is offer non license fee payers a way to see (some) BBC shows legally far sooner than waiting to rent or buy on DVD.  It should be noted that International co-productions (Such as big budget shows like the new Dr Who, produced with Canada's CBC, or the natural history documentaries produced with the Discovery Channel and Japan's NHK) are not being offered.

Revver for sale

CNET reports that video sharing site Revver is up for sale for the bargain price of $300,000 to $500,000 - an extraordinary low price, at the bottom end, it's no more than I paid for my Southsea Terrace. Potential buyers should be aware that the firm comes with over a million dollars of debt and an operating loss that has been hemorrhaging venture capital since the start. It seems more likely it'll go under.

Revver's claim to fame was as the first video sharing site to split advertising revenue with content providers and scored an early viral hit with eepybird's "Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos experiments". Howver revver never managed to sustain the sort of mass viewership that youtube seemed to amongst it's bviewers. EepyBird's most famous clip got over 11 million views. However Eepybird's most recent clip garnered a mere 2,000 odd views (some clips get that many views on youtube by accident!)

One much vaunted internet serial was Pink: The Series which had real production values, a name star (Pamela Anderson's former co-star Natalie Raitano) and a catchy "watch the next episode" narrative designed to hold an audience, yet it only managed to draw 20,000 viewers per episode on Revver. The producers of Pink also posted the episodes on Youtube where the first episode picked up two million viewers (it has to be said, later episodes didn't do anything like as well, while still surpassing any of Revver's figures - the first episode's success probably had more to do with being featured on Youtube's front page for a week or two than anything else.)

With numbers like that, Revver wasn't generating the money for itself, its producers or the advertisers. Meanwhile, Youtube is still drawing the big "audiences", and producers might feel that getting a million views but no money on Youtube was still worth more than the small amount of money that they might they would get from Revver. (At a glance I'd say Pink cost several thousands of dollars to make, and has earned a few hundreds from Revver, which hardly seems worth the effort.) Part of Youtube's success is its focus on the social networking aspect: commenting on/responding to videos, sharing, having "friends" and a home page. etc. Revver focused on attracting a "higher class" of content provider with better quality video and revenue sharing. Revver recently added some of those youtube style features too, but rather too late, to general apathy on the part of viewers and some trepidation from content providers- did they really want anonymous surfers leaving "this sucks, d00d" messages under the fruits of their labour? Meanwhile with it's crappy 200kb/s, 320x240 lo-fi image, Youtube is still raking the hits in!

In the end, part of Revver's legacy is that it forced the other video sharing sites to take producers seriously and start sharing the vast amount of revenue they were making out of other's hard work. And in that respect, they can always say they were the first.

Why is this important? More later...

David Lynch on iPhone

BEWARE: this clip features Strong language! Viewer discretion advised



I sympathise in some ways, but also feel like saying "Hey Grandad! Get with the new groove!" -- or something.

I wouldn't want to watch Blue Velvet or Dune or The Elephant Man, or even Twin Peaks (the TV show) on an iPhone, or on Youtube, but feel that content should be designed specifically FOR these new media outlets. The problem comes when, basically EVERYTHING gets designed for viewing on iPhones, the way that most movies are currently designed to be watched on TV screens (which is, in fact where usually they'll find their biggest audience).

However some people are missing the point. Some are calling Lynch a cranky old man, someone who doesn't understand new media. Lynch does. He's a pioneer (as far as big name producer/directors go) of using the internet as a way of getting new material out there way before such an approach became de rigueur for the independent set.

It should be pointed out that the iPhone logo and music were added later (and is available for download in a format for viewing on your iPhone). It's made it look like Lynch is specifically having a go at Apple and the iPhone, though when this was recorded, there probably WAS no iPhone! It's probably that which has got the bloggers so excited.

CGI extravaganza on a budget!

This movie has been lighting up the blogosphere! I found it by way of Mike Curtis' excellent HD for Indies blog.



A crew of four recreate the D-Day attack Omaha beach for BBC's Timewatch programme. A cast of three, basic costumes and props, a researcher operating a Z1E camera, a roll of greenscreenmaterial and a single saloon car. Add to the mix some small explosions filmed in a back yard and a ton of photographic references.

Of course the degraded Saving Private Ryan look and the Youtube compression helps cover a multitude of sins, but this is designed for TV broadcast so has to meet the BBC's standards. Mike Curtis says "All desktop doable".

A second segment is here, and a production blog explaining some of the process is here.

"Lenny's Luck"

I have completed my latest short Film "Lenny's Luck". It's inspired very loosely by a story about the great jazz guitarist and recording technology pioneer Les Paul, though I've jazzed up the "facts" so, you should consider all elements of the story as purely fuctional, and any similarities purely coincidental.

The film was shot in 1080i HDV on a Sony Z1E. We used Cineframe 25 mode and recorded the sound on camera. I directed and recorded sound. Karen Savage did lighting and camera, Aysegul Epengin produced and was responsible for art direction.

Anthony Tivey served double duty as Gaffer, and then needed to be drafted in to play "Lenny" when our lead actor failed to turn up. He did a fine job, despite the fact that he never saw the script, and about the only meaningful direction I gave him was "can you do an American accent?" In fact all the cast we great and I'm thoroughly grateful to them all.

The film was largely shot in one day in a Studio in Chichester University with a few pick ups filmed at Portsmouth University a week or so later. Post production was done on iMovie and in Garageband, using the great new feature of being able to play music while watching the video. Titles were done in Gimp.

The film was premiered at Portsmouth University's Wiltshire Studio 1 on the 29 October, and was projected in High Definition. The video will be posted online in the new year. In the mean time here is a link to a gallery of behind the scenes stills.

Perian

Perian is an amazing component for Mac OSX quicktime that allows Quicktime to handle additional video codecs, including Flash video. If you want to use flash clips with the also-incredibly-useful MPEG Streamclip, (say to trim and convert videos downloaded from youtube) Perian will allow you to use them. It's just become one of those mandatory to install programs for me. I used it recently to convert some public domain video on Youtube to DVD and DV.

Safari for PC

The Apple web browser Safari is now available for Windows. It's a public beta and still very buggy (it crashes a lot on my work PC) but is the simplest and easiest way to dowload or find the link for Youtube videos if you want to embed them with Jeroen Wijering's superior JW FLV Player instead of the YouTube embedded player, as described in a previous post.

If you open the activity window, the largest file, and one that;sporgressively downloading, will be the flash video file (it;s usually a few megabytes, depending on the running time of the video. Double click on it and it will download to Safari's chosen download folder (by default, the desktop). You'll need to add the .flv suffix; this file will play in VLC player. At this point you can't copy/paste from the PC version of Safari's activity window, but if you want to find the location of the original flash video file, then you can do it with this website: keepvid.com You simply copy the address in the "URL" textbox on the YouTube page, and paste it into the download text box on the Keepvid page. Click "download" and the Keepvid will then show a direct link to the page. right click (or CRTL+click for one button mouse users) on the >>Download link<< and copy the link location. You'll get an address somthing like http://chi-v18.chi.youtube.com/get_video?video_id=ZFQ6FLP2GHo. Paste this link into the "file" variable when using the JW FLV player, adding ".flv" as an extension to the end. You can even make the file on YouTube private so it can't be seen via youtube, only on your own website.

Now, I'm not a lawyer, I don't even play one on TV, but I can't see anywhere that this violates YouTube's terms of use, though I can't imagine they WANT you to do this. However in terms of the features it adds to video playback I think it's worth doing, until I'm told to cease and desist.

RE: YouTube on AppleTV, follow up..

Well, here's the answer.... Apple isn't installing flash on AppleTV; Youtube will re-encode all its content to the h.264 codec.

Now if only there were some specs on what quality that would be to. Is it larger than the 320x240 currently employed by YouTube? Allegedly 16:9 clips now play in full screen, but is it a proper 16:9 raster (eg 480x272 pixels) or anamorphically distorted from a 4:3 resolution? Is there a way (or a hack) to embed these h.264 clips in websites? For example Revver currently offers both Quicktime and flash as embeds, will YouTube offer that too? Would Apple let them? Quicktime may want to offer YouTube clips at a higher quality (gosh, what an incentive!) for AppleTV customers only, but alternatively could see a way of using Youtube to get Quicktime into even more computers.

Souces:
www.ilounge.com
www.AppleTVhacker.com

Youtube on AppleTV

I found this link via Cinematech. Steve Jobs announces that AppleTV will start streaming Youtube videos. This is interesting as at last, there is a simple hardware way of getting Youtube content onto a TV. A few weeks ago, a hack was announced for the AppleTV that allowed you to watch Youtube vids on a TV. However the problem was that you would be limited to browsing the most popular vids. The What's not clear at the moment is how these videos will be stored and played back.

AppleTV is quicktime based, and the above plug in uses a hack to playback Youtube's FLV files. Will the Youtube for AppleTV files be re-encoded in quicktime? Will they be available at (potentially) higher quality (say comparable to Revver which hosts vids at 480*360 for 4:3 and 600*360 for 16:9 at around 700Kbs?) Steve Jobs is right when he says that the limiting factor for Youtube vids is the quality of the original footage (I made a similar point in my previous post). However that's not the case with all material.

The Apple press release (primarily for a new bigger capacity model of the AppleTV) states "Thousands of the most current and popular YouTube videos will be available on Apple TV at launch in mid-June, with YouTube adding thousands more each week until the full YouTube catalog is available this fall." this staggered roll out implies something other than Youtube's website being plugged into iTunes.

SO if higher quality Quicktime files ARE able to be posted on websites, will non-AppleTV users be able to access them (other than via hacking) - will the content owner be able to offer higher quality QT versions of their clips for embedding? One thought: Youtube is now offering revenue sharing with certain content producing partners. Will these partners be able to have higher quality clips than Joe or Jo Public?

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.