With some gentle persuasion, our office has been buying more OWC Mercury Elite-AL Pro Drives than LaCie drives to fill out external hard drive needs. With the launch of a new daily web show on March 7th, our office is in a buying mood to build out what is needed for this new show. On the purchase list, five 750 GB “Quad-Interface” (eSATA, FW800, FW 400, USB2) OWC drives.

Not only is OWC (Other World Computing) customer service much easier to get a hold of than LaCie, but they are unbelievably willing to meet your needs. Just last week, one of the drives we ordered from them was having electrical issues - basically it wasn’t mounting regularly. I gave them a call and in about five minutes, I had a solution: We were to send this “faulty” drive back to them, meanwhile OWC would cross-ship us a replacement. This all happened Monday, by Friday we had a new drive in our hands. Amazing! The are really, “Other World Computing.”

I have been using OWC drives for my personal and profession storage needs for about two years now, and I have no complaints about their drives, or doing business with them. If you live in the mid-west you will experience a shorter shipping time seeing that OWC in in Illinois.

Check them out - they do more than externals too. Any upgrades you need for your mac, they probably have it. Look them up - I would bet you enjoy them as much as I have.

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Well, we can talk about it now. Moblogic.tv is the NEW web show I spoke about back in December. Check out their first teaser video posted on their site.

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Last week announced new MacPros… if you haven’t taken a look at these things yet, please do. The upgrades Apple has released and great. These upgrades come a week before MacWorld ‘08.

Many rumors  are floating around regarding Apple and what they will announce at the end of the week. There are high hopes for “MacBook Air,” Apple’s ultra-thin MacBook. There is also a lot of speculation surrounding iTunes and what advancements will be made public. I’ll be keeping my ears open for information that may affect this community.

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So, if Apple was a wide west cowboy, and he was walking through town right now, he’d be holding his head high sporting a nice Smith and Weston getting ready to walk in to the saloon for a drink… when Cowboy Apple steps in a huge stinky pile of horse you know what…. That’s right right folks, Apple has a small (but stinky) issue on their hands.

Final Cut is having issues opening some FCP projects. Unfortunately, Apple hasn’t nailed down the problem yet, and no one has any idea what is causing it, or where it started. Basically is goes like this (some of the time)…. save a project on one FCP machine, go to open in on another running the same version, and Final Cut presents you with an error that reads: This project is unreadable or may be too new for this version of Final Cut. “WHAT?! I just saved it!” Yes, that’s right. Your project can’t be opened. And some times when you go back to the original machine you saved the project on, and that machine will not open it.

Now there is a work around. It annoying, but you do get your sequence back…

(more…)

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Over the past couple of weeks I have been working tirelessly on export settings for a new web show that will be using a flash encode on a huge 800px wide player. Not many sites out there are running video at 800px wide for obvious reasons. But it will be attempted if not done. The show is looking to advance how people see web video and the quality they see it at. Not an easy feat when you want to run it as big as they do.

Unfortunately, I’m not able to say what the show is called, what its about, who is working on it or anything else surrounding it. However, the interest here is on the player and the video. Blip.tv is a major supplier of web video all over the web. Many people use Blip to distribute their content to their site, iTunes and other venues across the net. Wallstrip.com uses blip and embeds Blip’s player in their site. The concept is similar for the new show.

When you submit video to Blip, they reencode your video at their (less the great) Flash setting, rendering even the cleanest of source files, looking very “YouTubey.” After many conversations with Blip, Wallstrip’s web producer told me that if you submit your own Flash file to them, they will not reencode it. Amazing! This means that you can get a file looking the way you want it, and Blip will post it as they get it.

Excellent, right? Well, almost. In the tests I have run, I found several issues with Flash files that you may not expect if you have been working with QuickTime files. Flash encoded files are more processor intensive than other files, therefore the “max bandwidth” setting can’t be as high as it could with other files. I usually encode *.mov files for the web around 1200 or 1500 kbps which results in a good looking QT files that is playable everywhere. The Flash files we were working on here (800 x 450px) on the other hand bog down even the newest of macs at 1000 kbps. Now you may have a sweet looking file, but 1/2 your viewers will not be able to watch it.

Our solution, lower the bandwidth (about 800kpbs), up the key framing (7), and make the audio mono at 64kbps. This resulted in a (not as good but still) great looking file that didn’t kill every machine we tested it on. It took us about a week and 40 to 50 files to finally find the right combination. As a general rule, do a lot of tests - it will take time, but once you find what you are looking for, it will be well worth it. Also, save every setting you use on a file - name the file the same as you name the saved setting so you can pair them up again later.

As we all know, web video is fun, fresh and exciting to work on, but doing it well, and producing a quality product is the challenge. Happy encoding.

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