>The Stuff of Life from Amnesty
>I’ve been advising Amnesty International UK on some video matter recently. They wanted to get a newly commissioned video The Stuff of Life on the web so it could be easily distributed and embedded by activists across the web. The film imitates a glossy TV advert, and so the perception of production values was essential. The issue was getting it in as high a quality as possible, while allowing as many people as possible to watch it. The most important thing from my perspective was that the film played fully without buffering as I believe that had a terribly detrimental effect on the impact of the film.
The final file ended up at a bit rate of around 700 to 800 kbps, which was around 200kbps higher than I had originally expected. But as always with web video it’s essential to try a test file and see. I’m on a standard BT broadband wireless connection and this file has played consistently well for me – the proof is in the pudding it seems.
Incidentally, the production company did a lot of testing with Blip.tv. I’d suggested Blip originally, as their player comes with lots of distribution benefits and good tracking which was important for AIUK. Following testing they felt that Blip performance varied considerably and files which would play fine one day buffered a lot the next. They also felt that the same file while performing well enough through another set up was not served as well by Blip. I can’t verify this for myself, but it seems if a really glossy high production values are essential for you, Blip may not be the solution.
Watch the The Stuff of Life and spread the word.
http://unsubscribe-me.org/films/blipesque-sof-sml.swf
Read More>New Blip.tv episode pages
>As you may know I’m a big fan and user of Blip.tv. It’s a great free service and they make regular improvements and developments.
I tend to use Blip more as a video hosting and distribution service than as video destination in itself. Because they are so good at sending video content out into the web and to devices, I’m fairly sure that most of their video content is consumed in locations other blip.tv.
Possibly to try and draw more people to the site they are redeveloping their episode pages. It’ll be interesting to see the outcome of this. It makes you realise that any large list of comments below a video player draws comparisons with everyone’s favourite Youtube.
Read More>Video Comparison Shoot Out
>I’m a great fan of blip.tv for all your video needs. Blip offers a great deal of functionality and features for very little expense. One of the strongest features is that Blip gives you a great deal of control over the quality of the final embedded video.
It creates flash versions of your uploaded format at a similar bitrate to the original file. This means you can create a flash embedded version of your file at exactly the standard, size and quality you want.
PC World magazine have created a video comparison of various video sites such as Youtube, Revver and Brightcove. They’ve uploaded a test file to these sites and compared the embedded flash version the sites create.
It’s slightly flawed because they’ve compared a Quicktime version from blip.tv against flash versions from the competitors. Nonetheless it’s still interesting if you keep that in mind.
The list of other great advantages of Blip is too long to go into when there is Christmas Shopping to do and my Best of 2007 CD to make. More harping on about blip.tv again in the New Year.
Read More>Horniman Jellyfish
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