The present and future of post production business and technology

New addition to the HTML5 Spec – Captions http://bit.ly/cUlAvt And a “new track’ element as well.

subtitles: Translation of the dialogue, suitable for when the sound is available but not understood (e.g. because the user does not understand the language of the media resource’s soundtrack).

captions: Transcription of the dialogue, suitable for when the soundtrack is unavailable (e.g. because it is muted or because the user is deaf).

descriptions: Textual descriptions of the video component of the media resource, intended for audio synthesis when the visual component is unavailable (e.g. because the user is interacting with the application without a screen while driving, or because the user is blind).

chapters: Chapter titles, intended to be used for navigating the media resource.

metadata: Tracks intended for use from script.

More flexibility without resorting to a proprietary player.

FCC to Overhaul Regulation of Internet Lines to protect Net Neutrality. http://bit.ly/cF3s0V (Sorry the WSJ doesn’t have open access. One workaround is to copy the headline into the Google News search and link from there.)

Net Neutrality – the principle that all packets on an ISP’s network will be treated the same, no matter where they’re from – is important to the future of the Internet. Without it, an Internet provider could decide to delay VOIP packets from say, Vonage, but favor VOIP packets from their own service; or the ISP could try and force Google to pay a premium so Google’s traffic isn’t slowed on the Internet.

However, the real problem is not Net Neutrality, it’s a lack of real competition in most markets. If there was robust competition in supplying high speed internet connections, there would be no question about one ISP selectively slowing traffic. If any ISP tried it, they would lose customers to the competition. Right now the lack of real competition in most markets makes Net Neutrality legislation important.

But I’d rather it was achieved by competition rather than legislation, as most legislators don’t really understand the issues and “collatoral” damage ensues.

On Wednesday, Mr. Genachowski’s staff began briefing the FCC’s commissioners on how they will propose to regulate Internet lines under rules that were written for traditional phone networks. Some of those rules won’t be applied to Internet networks, FCC officials say, but others will be used to enforce net neutrality, or regulations that require Internet providers to treat traffic equally and not slow or block websites.

Scribd goes HTML5 for online document and presentation delivery. http://tcrn.ch/aJBWqG

Adobe’s much-beleaguered Flash is about to take another hit and online documents are finally going to join the Web on a more equal footing. Today, most documents (PDFs, Word docs, Powerpoint slides) can mostly be viewed only as boxed off curiosities in a Flash player, not as full Web pages. Tomorrow, online document sharing site Scribd will start to ditch Flash across its tens of millions of uploaded documents and convert them all to native HTML5 Web pages. Not only will these documents look great on the iPad’s no-Flash browser (see screenshots), but it will bring the richness of fonts and graphics from documents to native Web pages

Another brick in the wall!

When Ads become content… http://bit.ly/bfJD86 …we don’t hate them as much! If they’re entertaining and relevant, they’re content.

I enjoyed listening to Carol Bartz, the CEO of Yahoo!, who was in London last week to address the European press and analysts. She’s smart, focused and entertaining – a rarer combination than it should be. But one thing in particular struck me. When she was asked about the future of online advertising, she commented that in the future, “ads should be as interesting as the content.”

People watching more long form on smartphones than expected. http://nyti.ms/coFcGD

The stations would transmit to phones over the airwaves, much like Flo TV, a unit of Qualcomm, which has invested about $1 billion in mobile video distribution. The service sends channels like ESPN, Fox News and MTV to phones.

“Putting the concepts of mobility and watching video together is a natural, and we’re seeing it really grow right now,” said Flo TV’s president, Bill Stone.

Mr. Stone says the average Flo user watches 30 minutes of video a day. So far, though, few people are ponying up $10 a month or more for the service.

But that is not stopping other media companies from trying to charge for walled gardens of content. Beginning later this year, Bitbop, a product of the News Corporation’s Fox Mobile Group, will stream TV episodes to smartphones for $9.99 a month.

Flash is a platform, H.264 is a codec. One cannot kill the other. http://bit.ly/98Y588 Dan Raburn explains the difference.

As I tried to do with my “What’s the difference between a codec, and a container or wrapper” article from mid 2009, it’s not a question of H.264 vs Flash because since November 2007 Flash has played H.264 MP4 files – the same files used in Apple’s mobile devices (although Flash can play more variations on H.264 than Apple’s devices, btw).

Dan explains that Flash brings a lot more to the table – DRM, interactivity, etc – that is not available with a plain HTML5 video tag playback. This is provided at the CSS/Javascript level outside of Flash.

So the real debate with H.264 has nothing to do with Flash, but rather with the browsers that support and play back video. Microsoft has said they will only support H.264 in IE9, but we have to remember that IE6 still has close to 10% market share and the browser is nine years old. Looking at my own traffic stats for my blog, nearly 15% of my traffic each month comes from viewers using IE6. Like it or not, that’s reality. So the idea that H.264 video playback in a browser that supports HTML5 is somehow going to work for all viewers overnight is simply not the case. How many Internet viewers will have an HTML5 compatible browser in the next two years? Not as many as some seem to think.

The article is definitely worth a detailed read.

Enable CUDA for Adobe Mercury Engine on unsupported cards? http://bit.ly/92VapW

The fact that Adobe has made this as easy as it is – by simply editing an entry in a text file – suggests they don’t really oppose users doing this on unsupported cards. It’s my understanding that Adobe have supported a relatively small number of CUDA-capable cards so they could be thoroughly tested and to have fewer variables during development. Not sure how you do this on a Mac though.

Remember this is UNSUPPORTED. You are on your own with problems! And you can’t go blaming Adobe for any crashing or other problems on an unsupported configuration. But you can test, and if there are problems, just reverse the change to the text file.

Sony EX3 3D stereoscopy camera revealed? http://bit.ly/dsmWzy Why didn’t Sony preview this at NAB? Double lens configs for “thre rest” 3D?

Looks like the Panasonic 3D camera with dual lens configuration. Is this the way for “democratized” 3D production – dual lenses that make configuration that much easier?

Looks like Jobs was right. H.264 already makes up 66% of web video http://tcrn.ch/cHD2jI (including H.264 played via Flash players)

In his slam on Flash, Steve Jobs argued that most video on the web was already in an iDevice-ready format: H.264. Well, encoding.com’s figures show that, in the last year, FLV and H.264 video have changed position: H.264 up from 31% a year ago to 66% now. FLV & VP6 (Flash 7 onward) combined moved from 69% down to a combined 26% now.

It’s important to note that since Flash 9r3 (Nov 2007) Flash has been able to play MP4 H.264 video – the same as is played on the Apple portable devices: Flash is not required to view these videos.

When Adobe announced H.264 support in Flash I wrote this for the Digital Production BuZZ news feed:

This is a seriously good development in web delivery and establishes H.264/AAC in an MPEG-4 (mp4/m4v) wrapper as the dominant web format. Gone is the need to encode separate versions for Flash and MPEG-4. Now you you can load and play .mp4, .m4v, .m4a, .mov (limited support) and .3gp files into a Flash player using the same API used to load FLV files now. The same files will now play in Flash, QuickTime Player, iPod, Apple TV and many other players.

And so it has come to pass!

TV Ditches Paper Scripts for iPad, Saves $2,000 a Month http://bit.ly/b6Hc1d Reporters use the iPad to write and read scripts.

A TV station in Albany, Georgia is saving US$2,000 per month in printing costs by using iPads for writing and reading scripts. The station, WFXL, is one of 15 stations owned by Barrington Broadcasting, and it made the switch to both save money and reduce the company’s carbon footprint.

According to an article by Poynter Online, the station e-mails new and edited scripts to individual e-mail accounts set up for each iPad. Each iPad is also set up with a $6.99 iPad app called iAnnotate PDF — a PDF reader and annotation tool — for using the scripts in live and recorded situations.