• A device suitable for playing videos, playing music, or reading books.
• Wifi and 3G data connections
• Ability to playback interactive video/audio (similar to experience of a DVD, but QT based)
• Multi-mode use (ability to dock with keyboard/screen or use as tablet only)
• Front facing camera for video conferencing
• Solid State Drive (fewer moving parts and hopefully relatively fast on/off)
• Long battery life – 6+hours of usage w/o video playback, 4+ with video playback
• Minimum 720p playback

Specs along this line become a serious game changer for me.  This is a device I’d carry way, way more often than my laptop.  In fact, a small Bluetooth keyboard and mouse along with this would potentially replace my laptop in many situations.  I’ve come extremely close to buying a kindle in the past year and the hold out for me was it to single purpose in its intent.  If this device can serve as that e-reader, as well as a more broad media device it’s very likely to find a place in my house pretty quickly. If there is a development environment for creating interactive content that comes out with it, then i’m really excited about the idea of creating custom content with this UI in mind, both for the training and general entertainment worlds. EDIT: adding Wired’s excellent summary of what they expect on Wednesday.

I’ve mentioned Screenflow here repeatedly – well Telestream, makers of Flipfactory & Episode have now purchase Vara Software who make it, along with 2 other product – Video Cue & Wirecast.

Telestream has done a pretty good job with its purchases (Episode was originally Compression Master, and application by Pop Wire who were also purchased by Telestream) so i’ll be curious to see where this goes.

Matt Jeppsen from FreshDV made the requested that I follow up last weeks encoder shootout with new settings where I attempt to closely match the settings of each application so the results could then be compared.  I took this to heart, though I didn’t attempt to necessarily identically match the settings verbatim.  Here is why – as I noted last time, the tools each obviously run a wide gamut of prices and as one would expect, they also vary a great deal in what they allow you to do to the video.  I didn’t necessarily want to intentionally cripple an application that had taken the time to either create or at least expose to the user a feature that dramatically helped improve the quality or speed of the encode.

So with that in mind, I have rerun my tests with each application.  I have targeted the same approximate data rate and screen resolution for each setting.  However, I have enabled some color/luma settings, specific deinterlace, and crop options where they exist.  Effectively, I created the settings I would ideally want to use for each application to get what isn’t necessarily the best results, but is the right mix of quality, speed of encode, and file size that I decided I like the best.  This may not be quite what Matt was hoping for, but I just don’t believe an apples to apples comparison of these is quite possible, especially having now run the tests twice.

One more note – I didn’t bother running Turbo.264 again in this test.  While its true you can make some custom settings in Turbo, as I began truly exploring this area, I found them to not particularly help improve anything.  At minimum I wanted to crop this content to remove the letterbox introduced in the edit process.  This prove impossible as far as I could tell, which was a bit disappointing.  With that in mind, I saw no benefit in rerunning identical results and therefore disqualified it from this round.  While I found this to be one of the fastest options possible before, the fact that the encode settings were so basic makes it less useful.

Speed Results

As we look at the results, here were the things that stood out for me  – all the times were closer to one another than the last test.  True, Compressor still took the longest, but it definitely closed the gap.  Both it and Episodes times fell and were more consistent this go around (notice neither had an extremely long run as they did before).  Visual Hub’s time did increase, which I expect, though not very much.

Let’s factor one more element into the time results which are not documented in the chart – setup time.  Very quickly I realized I needed to limit the number of attempts I made before deciding on the most optimized settings (in the past, I’ve literally spent whole days just tweaking the settings until I was satisfied).  Since I was under the gun to get these results in before a trip, I limited myself to 3 tests max per application.  Even in limiting to 3 goes, I found the time spent in trying settings (or in some case looking for the settings I wanted to try).  Despite having a huge amount of knobs and dials to play with, I was able to breeze through Episodes settings fairly quick.  I attribute this less to a clean interface (I’ve never accused EP of that!) and more with my experience with the application.  Interface-wise it has changed very little since it was originally launched and having used it quite a bit now, i can run through it very quickly.  The first time you try some of the more advanced settings, it can be quite intimidating, but once you know what to look for (and what to avoid) its fairly smooth sailing.

Visual Hub has very few advanced settings, so this also didnt take that long to run through and in fact it only took 2 tries to hit a file i was happy with.  Compressor however, did take longer to fully get setup.  I haven’t used Compressor a whole bunch professionally since it updated to 3.0 so i’m not sure if things moved since I last used it a great deal, or if the amount of time since I used it caused me to forget some things.  I also got confused by a screen bug I saw on my MacPro that I didn’t see on the MacBook Pro.  Once I cropped the image and set the new correct size and aspect ratio, I was getting a strange stretched version of the image that didn’t match my settings.  After struggling with it for awhile, I discovered that the exported file didn’t actually contain this, so I ignored it (again, this bug never appeared on the MBP).  All in all, I’d say I spent about 45 minutes on Compressor getting setting optimized while both Visual Hub and Episode Pro took about 20-25 minutes.  Most of this time is tweaking settings, as I only encoded 30 second clips for testing.  It was much easier to do this in Compressor and Episode Pro, which allowed me to set in and out points than in Visual Hub, where I actually made a quick reference file of the 30 seconds i wanted to test.

Quality Results

I’ve documented the results less here than I did before, but I did want to show the metal grate that highlighted the different results in the previous test.

In dealing with the interline twitter, I thought the new settings were definitely better in Episode Pro, slightly better in Compressor, and worse in Visual Hub (click through to see the full size screen shot.

In an overall quality comparison, I also thought Episode came out looking best, followed by Visual Hub and Compressor.  There is a sharpness to the image (both video and gfx) in the Episode Pro encode that the other two don’t have (again, check out the full screen to really see the difference).

Conclusions

As I more or less originally stated, if you want full control of the settings –   a high end application is worth the money.  Episode assuredly stands out, though it takes someone with experience and confidence in the settings they are applying to get the results they want.  Compressor, as an essentially free product (as its bundled with Final Cut Studio)  has a number or advanced settings, though the set up wasn’t as intuitive, nor the results as pleasing.  Visual Hub, despite its lack of control, still turned out a fairly decent product, given the price tag though it just could achieve quality i really wanted with the settings i needed.  As was just noted in a meeting I had the other day, a professional compressionist likes to have a lot of tools at his finger tips for encoding and while some may get used more than others, each has their place.

But it doesn’t mean I wasn’t checking out interesting things on the web. In fact, this week, I was looking for various video & compression related tools for the Macintosh and thought I should put together what I found.

ScreenFlow 1.1.2

If you have ever done a desktop screen capture for training, you know there are a handful of applications out there for this now. For years the one and only go to was Ambrosia’s Snapz Pro. But Snapz always had some issues, and several other options began to appear. The newest I’ve seen is ScreenFlow from Vara Software. Unlike the other tools for this, which are basically just screen recorders (leaving you with QuickTime files ready for editing), ScreenFlow actually has editing tools built right in! ScreenFlow allows to you do after the fact call out and highlights of specific parts of the screen, which is incredibly handy as you are trying to put together a quick tutorial or example of how to do something.

The down side? Screenflow is Leopard only, so unless you’re on a new mac or have upgraded, it’s not the tool for you. Some people may balk at the $99.99 price tag as well, but if you are in the business of producing screen based content, this is a fairly minor cost. If you need either a cheaper or more backwards compatible solution, try old reliable stand by iShowU from Shiny White Box.

Countdown Maker 1.1

Need a little countdown clock for your video? Want it to be custom, rather than the default countdown in Final Cut Pro (does anyone even use that?). Countdown Maker is a simple little shareware app that generates a QuickTime movie of custom lengths, fonts, colors, backgrounds, etc.

Now at $49, this seems way overpriced to me, but then again, if you send out a lot of custom video productions and would like to have your own countdown slate. Maybe not for everybody, but I thought the demo was pretty neat.

RoadMovie 1.4.1

 Both Lisa and I are fairly big fans of foreign films and there have been a few times I’ve compressed something from DVD’s to watch, only to remember later that I neglected to burn in the subtitles. If you have ever had this problem, RoadMovie is the app for you.

Here’s an example of this – I recently bought Kung Fu Hutstle and wanted to watch it on my laptop while I was traveling. I encoded it, but totally (stupidly) forgot to turn on subtitles – which I realized after I got on the plane. When i landed, I searched a bit and found subtitle source, a collection of subtitle files for various movies. I found a SRT file for it, then used RoadMovie to add subtitles to my movie, then flatten (versus transcoding) the file. Fairly quickly I was able to turn what was a useless file into something I could watch! Before I found RoadMovie, I would have had to re-encode from the DVD, which was a)impossible in this instance as the DVD was at home and b) very, very time consuming, even if I did have the disc. This is probably more useful to our international friends who want to see US content and need a translation, but I still use it occasionally.

Roadmovie will do more than this however – it has built in templates and can encode directly to formats that are ipod, iphone, and web friendly if you want (though I tend to only flatten the files, thus retaining the encode job I’ve already performed in one of my preferred applications). 

Roadmovie also has some great metadata editors that allow you to easily add info like the right category (TV, Movie, etc) or info like the director and handy things like chapter markers making it easy to jump to different sections of longer form content.

As we continue to get more international, tools like this that make it easy to add or change subtitles out will be dead handy. Best of all, its only $19.00, so it was totally worth it. Oh and if for some reason, if even that is too pricey, you can always look at Submerge from the same guy that has just the subtitle features without the metadata editors.

aspectRatio 1.8

Closer to home with the compression tools is the Aspect Ratio calculator called aspectRatio. I wrote about a couple in RWVC, but never saw this one before I think. As with all, its just a simple little tool that lets you quickly calculate a variety of aspect ratios as you are encoding your content for various destinations requiring a variety of resolutions.

The price tag here is exactly right – its free. Im not 100% who the author produceNewMedia is as their site is missing the about page, but they look pretty interesting.

VideoSpec 0.6.5

 And lastly, I found a little app called VideoSpec. Its function is to analyze files and present you with reports about the various codecs and metadata associated with the video. This can be incredibly handy if you have ever been given a video and asked to encode something either better than it or exactly like it. Now Semaphore (which for disclosure’s sake, I oversee as part of my daytime job) has more functionality and reporting capabilities, but is only PC based and is a pro-level tool with a pro price tag. Now, I’m not bagging my own product – its great, but it can also be overkill for some. With that in mind, VideoSpec is an cheap, simple, easy solution.

So that’s all I’ve found for now – you have a favorite video or compression tool then by all means, pass it along!