Lights, camera, listen up: the 9 rules of digital video creation

Emedia Professional,  May, 1998  by Jan Ozer

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Creating digital video--never an easy task--is now complicated by the range of available delivery options. In 1994, the publisher's challenge was optimizing quality for video displayed on a 486/66 from a 2X CD-ROM. Today, the same publisher may still care about that 486/66, but must also consider higher CD-ROM speeds, Internet streaming video, MPEG-1, or Indeo 5.0 for its higher-end customers and MPEG-2 for delivery on DVD.

Fortunately, digital video creation tools have matured in both feature set and ease-of-use, and all producers benefit from faster playback platforms. At the same time, advancements like digital video cameras and the DV format enable even small producers to deliver breathtaking video quality.

Still, filming, capturing, and compressing video footage involves a bewildering number of discrete decision points, from lighting to capture resolutions to codec choices and compression parameters. In this garbage-in/garbage-out medium, mistakes made anywhere in the creation process can irreparably degrade video quality.

Years of experimentation, development, and discussions with other video producers have distilled these decision points into a critical few, which largely determine the end quality of your digital video. These hard-and-fast "Nine Rules of Digital Video Creation" will help all video developers recognize their mistakes and, ultimately, avoid them entirely.

rule 1

BEGIN WITH THE END IN MIND

The first rule of effective digital video creation will undoubtedly be familiar to legions of Stephen Covey fans as the second rule of highly effective people: "Begin with the end in mind." Nowhere is this rule more applicable than in video development. Before beginning any video project, you have to know two simple things--what's my target platform, and how will I get the video there?

Target Platform

The easiest way to explain the significance of target platform in digital video creation is to relate my experience from a consulting job last year. The major consulting firm that contracted me maintained a depreciation schedule showing exactly when each class of machine would be retired from service. At the time, the computers ranged from some homely old 486/66 computers and laptops to the latest Pentium IIs. Any video developed had to play back well on all computers in service.

The company realized that this decision penalized owners of the more powerful computers, who wouldn't see the top-quality video their machines could deliver. For example, the company used Indeo 3.2 at 15 frames per second (fps) for its videos, though the top-end machines could easily handle the higher quality MPEG-1 format. Still, its definition of target platform included all computers and that was that.

For many companies and many projects, the answer is equally clear-cut. Developing video for your new training lab, all with Pentium 200MHz MMX boxes? No problem. Developing video for your sales force to use with their hot new Toshiba Tecra 760CDT? Life is grand.

For many others, especially title publishers, the decision is much less certain. Even for Christmas 1997, many developers chose to support platforms as low as 486/66. Essentially, it comes down to a choice of the slowest computer that you want your video to look good on, and this varies by project and producer. The key point is that by defining a target platform, you make the choice knowingly, and can therefore optimize development for your target.

Delivery Mechanism

Yet another factor to consider is the desired delivery mechanism--or method by which video will be delivered to the remote user. Traditionally, this has been the ubiquitous CD-ROM drive, but now your choices range from 28.8 dial-up, to ISDN, T1, LAN, or even DVD. Each poses its own challenges.

Essentially, the lowest common denominator between target platform and delivery mechanism governs overall video quality. For instance, a Pentium II 300MHz can easily play MPEG-1 video from the 16 to 24X CD-ROM drives installed on such machines. However, if you have to stream the video to the remote user at 28.8kbps, it will look much worse than video playing from a 2X CD-ROM on a 486/66 computer.

When distributing over the Internet, you also have to consider delivery paradigm, which can be either streaming or download-and-play. Streaming files must be compressed below the bandwidth of your target user, so if you're streaming video to 28.8kbps customers, video quality will be comparatively poor.

On the other hand, if your customers can wait a few minutes to download your clips and then play them, you can compress to bandwidths much higher than 28.8kbps and boost quality significantly. While no absolute rules apply, most sites publishing to a general Internet audience tend to favor streaming to better serve their fast-switch users. Conversely, many training or corporate communications-oriented intranets use download and play to optimize video quality.

Table 1 lists features to consider before starting development, and how they can impact your development decisions. After progressing through Table 1, you should be able to complete the video development profile contained in Table 2, designed for typical CD-ROM and intranet projects. If you start developing before completing this form, it's very likely that you'll have to go back and redo some steps, or worse yet, produce suboptimal quality video.