Commentary: Reflections From A Week At Stanford
Once H.264 becomes the only truly relevant codec, bit-stream standards will coalesce, templates in encoding tools will adhere to them more closely and producing for any of the four screens will be as complicated as picking a target and pressing the encode button. Sure, there will be some variation in encoding parameters, but fewer and fewer producers will care about them.
The emergence of Cloud Encoding as a viable encoding alternative for large companies
On its face, the concept of cloud encoding companies sounds kind of funky – take two hours to upload a 1GB raw video file and then start encoding? But then you realize that this is exactly the paradigm used by YouTube, Vimeo and multiple other UGC and OVP sites, and it certainly hasn’t held them back. You can also look forward and assume that in two or three years, broadband transmission speeds will approach the speed we loved on our LANs back in the late ‘90s, and that file uploading time will drop precipitously.
As more and more companies store their digital assets in the cloud, at least the re-encoding of these files won’t take a re-upload – just a very high speed transfer from one drive array to another. Since one of the key value propositions of cloud encoding is the transport of encoded files to distribution partners like Hulu and Brightcove, you would expect more and more of these outlets to be served via template, making the bit-level codec knowledge unimportant for their customers.
Today, to utilize a cloud encoding service, you need to know quit a bit about levels and profiles and entropy encoding. In two or three years, as standard targets coalesce, that won't be nearly so important.
Boosting Data Rates Cure All Ills
Back in the bad old days of streaming video, producing at 40Kbps for display over 56Kbps modems had little, if any, margin for error. You had to shoot, edit and encode to perfection to achieve even a quality. Any error at any phase reduced quality to a blocky, unwatchable mess.
Today, ESPN streams soccer highlights from their television show at 576x324@700Kbps (video only) and quality looks great. Granted, no one in the U.S. watches soccer highlights, but you get the idea. This is their high motion TV feed, not a motion limited, streaming version. And, they’re using VP6, not H.264, so can boost quality even further simply by moving to H.264.
Don’t get me wrong, there’s still a lot of bad streaming video out there, folks forgetting to deinterlace and producing at incorrect aspect ratios, backgrounds that shimmer and text that’s too small. But if you’re producing at reasonable data rates, producing for streaming has distilled down from an intensive one month course to a two or three day seminar, shorter if you already know how to white balance a camera and light a scene. In three years, producing for streaming will be no different than producing for television or DVD.
What’s this all mean? • If you’re a small to mid-size company, or a consultant to same, you have to strongly consider UGC or OVP service providers over a roll your own solution.
• If you’re developing streaming production courses, reflect these new realities into your curriculum. Over the next two to three years, the focus has to shift from how to produce streaming media into how to use it most effectively.
• If you’re planning out your career, either inside an organization or as a consultant, understand that the value of understanding deep level H.264 encoding parameters will peak in 2010 or 2011, then quickly decline. Perhaps another technology will take its place, but perhaps not. Not a lot of folks out there making big dollars telling companies how to produce MPEG-2 for DVDs.