Video

A few of the folks who have contacted me about BoinxTV after reading a piece here at ReadyMadeWeb have complained about audio static or “popping” when they switch between cameras.  I’ve found that this can be addressed in one of two ways.

First, by selecting the camera you’re going to switch to so that it appears in the preview window in the upper left corner of the BoinxTV window, you place this source in a sort of “on deck” position. This means that BoinxTV while BoinxTV will not be recording that source, it will be receiving a live feed of information from that source, so that a switch will be seamless.

Failing to place a source in the “on deck” position means that the switch will be abrupt, as the source will have to be initialized before BoinxTV can start recording from that source.  That’s what accounts for the static or popping sound.

Being that live production is often limited by how much human processing bandwidth you have—how many buttons, audio sources, camera adjustments, and sound mixer sendings you can pay attention to—it’s best to try to simplify where possible.  That’s why I find it helpful to have one constant audio audio source, rather than tying audio to cameras.  To do this, select the audio feed of one of your cameras as separate Audio Source layer (see the example above).  You can then select each of your video sources and remove the audio component from them entirely—failing to do this could result in reverb-like audio as you’ll be capturing the same audio twice.

By completely divorce audio and video, the issues of static and popping from source switching should be completely solved.

If you have questions about audio and video sources in BoinxTV, questions about live video production, or questions about anything else we’ve covered on ReadyMadeWeb.com, please email us at info@readymadeweb.com.

As I’ve covered in previous posts, BoinxTV can free you from the tedium of video post production by enabling simple live-to-disk or live-to-streaming video production.  Live production turns your Mac into a sort of TV studio in a box, allowing you to switch between cameras and other video sources, create overlays, and mix audio sources on the fly.  I’ve been recording live successfully for about 2 months, so I thought I’d share this diagram of my setup for recording live events for the Mercatus Center.

There are three main video feeds coming into my Mac.  One is from a Sony HVRZ1U, a pro-level camcorder that captures beautiful video.  This is a great camera for any range of applications, but is a much higher quality tool than is needed for this kind of web video production.

The overkill of the Sony is demonstrated by my second video source, an iSight camera from an old Mac desktop.  This is a great secondary camera as it’s light, easy to setup thanks to a tripod adapter I got from Steve Vigneau (a really cool guy who will sell you one for $20), and its FireWire connection works seamlessly with BoinxTV.

Finally, the third source of video is the Epiphan VGA2USB, an ingenious little box that turns a VGA signal into a USB webcam signal.  I use this to capture PowerPoint/Keynote presentations, web pages, or whatever else a presenter might be showing to an audience.  This is a real time saver as it eliminates the need to import graphics or slides into BoinxTV before a presentation.  It also eliminates the possibility of your slide order ever being different from the presenter’s, as you’re synced up completely to their machine.

The VGA2USB can also be used to grab the video output for your MacBook Pro (you’ll need a DVI to VGA converter or Mini DisplayPort to VGA adapter) and allow it to be captured by a second computer.  That second computer can then stream this “webcam” input to services like UStream, LiveStream, or Stickam.  Though I’ve shown how one computer can both capture and stream video using CamTwist, using the VGA2USB with a second computer can be a much better solution, especially when you’re capturing/streaming very high resolution video, which may overwhelm a single machine.

If you’re planning to use two FireWire video sources, you’ll need to add a second FireWire bus to your Mac.  MacBook Pros only ship with one FireWire bus—the hardware device that controls the devices plugged in to any FireWire port—and streaming FireWire video sources require a dedicated bus.  Thankfully you can add a second bus easily using the ExpressCard slot.  I’m using a $70 card made by Sonnet and it’s proven to be a solid little piece of hardware.  There are many other FireWire ExpressCards on the market, but the price difference is rather trivial and not worth the sacrifice in hardware quality.

You’ll also notice the FireWire to Cat5e converter boxes that allow me to placed my secondary camera up to 60 meters away from my MacBook Pro—the maximum transmission distance for a FireWire connection is only around 15 feet.  These nifty little gadgets are produced by Newnex can be picked up for around $300 from NTC Distributing.  Placing cameras far apart is key for creating professional-looking two-camera setups that allow you to readjust one camera while another camera remains stationary and captures the event.

Including the educational license for BoinTV at $249, this entire package can still easily total over $1000—and that’s excluding cameras and sound equipment.  However, when you look at the alternatives like NewTek’s TriCaster, a minimum investment of just under $4000 dollars, it’s clear that BoinxTV is a great deal.

If you’re ever been tasked with recording a lecture or a panel discussion at a conference, you know how time consuming and tedious video recording and post production can be. Transferring DV tapes to your computer takes hours.Editing multiple camera feeds together takes even longer. If you want to live stream the production, that requires another camera and audio setup.

You can rid yourself of all of that tedium if you switch to a live production model. Until recently, this was incredibly expensive, something only TV stations could afford. Then came NewTek’s TriCaster, a product quickly adopted by geeks and gurus like Leo Laporte of the TWiT network.  But the TriCaster is still expensive, the cheapest model coming in at just under $4,000.00.  For a small business or a non-profit trying to run a conference on a shoestring, four grand is still a pretty high price to pay for video production.

Enter BoinxTV, an oddly titled software package from Boinx Software, a German company founded in 1996 by brothers Achim and Oliver Breidenbach.  BoinxTV allows you to turn your Mac into the hub of a fully digital production studio that can capture video from multiple sources all in real time.  That means you can connect multiple DV firewire cameras or USB web cams to your Mac and switch between those video sources, creating the look and feel of a live television broadcast.

A license for the software can run as low as $199 for the sponsored edition that places an add for BoinxTV at the end of each of your videos.  The non-sponsored version is $499.  If you’re affiliated with an educational institution, a non-sponsored license costs only $249.  Bottom line, at any of these price points the software is worth every penny given the amount of time it will save you and the amount of stress that it will wring out of your work flow.

You can use CamTwist, covered in a recent post, to capture the output of BoinxTV—complete with video switching and graphical overlays—and broadcast it over Ustream, Justin.TV, or Stickam.

I recently used this software to record a panel discussion with Elinor Ostrom, the 2009 Nobel Laureate in Economics.  The room was incredibly crowded, so the ability to switch from the camera at the rear of the lecture hall to the camera placed at the front of the room came in handy as I needed to readjust the rear camera in order to avoid taping the back of peoples’ heads.  Here’s the video:

Boinx has produced a whole bunch of videos that will show you the ins and outs of the software before you buy it. This overview and “getting started” guide really give you a great idea what features the product contains:

You may also find these videos helpful. They illustrate how to work with devices and how add RSS feed tickers to your videos:

If you really want to delve into a whole host of features that BoinxTV offer, you can watch this lengthy webinar video:

As always, please post a comment or email us at info@readymadeweb.com if you have any questions about this or any other post.

For anyone creating long-form videos such as recordings of lectures, conference presentations, panel discussions, or other lengthy and large videos, Blip.tv is an excellent and cheap means of hosting and distributing your video.

Most other video platforms are limit your uploads to under 500 or even 300 megabytes.  Blitp.tv caters to big file sizes, allowing up to 1GB uploads, making it stand out in an increasingly crowded video hosting marketplace.

Blip.tv is also impressive because of its distribution system—a totally automated system that boasts some of the coolest tie-ins in the market.  After a bit of setup, your uploaded video (so long as its short enough) should automatically be mirrored at Flickr, the Internet Archive, YouTube.  If you’re willing to shell out some dough, you can also mirror your content at Vimeo.com, another popular video service.  If you don’t have accounts with any one of these services, you’ll need to jump through the hoops of a few sign-up forms as account sign-up is not automatic.

In the things that will impress the boss department, Blip will make your video show up on a plain old television.  With support for Boxee, Roku, and the near-omnipresent TiVo, your videos can light up living rooms with little effort on your part.  These syndication deals aren’t as automatic as those listed above—each of these TV-centered services will have to approve an application to syndicate your content.  So, make sure your videos are looking good, your descriptions are clear, and that you have enough content up to show that you’re a reliable source of good quality material.

Aggregation services are also included in this automated distribution system.  Yahoo! Video, AOL Video, Mefeedia, and Blinkx are included and require no additional setup.  If you have a pro account (only $8/month), a video podcast feed will also be created at and automatically submitted to iTunes, saving you the step of updating a separate podcast feed.  (If you already have a video podcast running through Feedburner, you can easily change your source feed to Blip.tv to take advantage of this service.)  To make sure your feed is listed in iTunes a 600×600 graphic should be uploaded to act as your “cover art” for your podcast.

Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and Delicious accounts can also be tied into Blip.tv to save you the time of updating your followers and friends on each service individually.

You can also save yourself the trouble of writing a new post to your blog as Blip supports every major blogging and platform—Moveable Type, TypePad, Blogger, WordPress and others—along with the popular open-source CMS system Drupal.

Other odds and ends in the goodie box at Blip include automatic conversion to MP3 format—which could save podcasters on hosting their own media files—and options for creating your own players as well as hosting multiple formats for the same video.  An upload tool (for Windows, Mac, and Linux) is also offered for those who will regularly be pushing large files.

Blip.tv also offers a generous 50/50 revenue split with content publishers who choose to opt-in to their advertising program, a source of income that could help a struggling blogger to pay the bills.

All-in-all this service seems to be the best on the market when considering the incredible amount of automation offered, the flexibility that large file sizes and multiple format encoding offers, and the incredibly cheap price of $8/month for the pro account.

If you have any questions about Blip.tv or if you have a favorite video hosting or distribution software of your own, please feel free to comment below.

photo credit: schmilblick

Yesterday I was involved in publishing a video a to YouTube that had some major PR power behind it—outreach to top bloggers as well as radio and TV exposure—so the video got a ton of views.  While the traffic to the video’s landing page skyrocketed, the view count of the video stayed stuck at somewhere just above 300 views for several hours.  Comments kept pouring in, the ratings number climbed, but the views stayed stuck.

Late today the number finally adjusted itself to a bit over 27,000 views.  A great number for the first day, but one that the users who helped make it happen couldn’t see—very frustrating.

After doing some searching I found this bit of unhelpful advice on the subject at the YouTube blog:

Video view counts reflect the YouTube community’s interests and the grassroots popularity of videos. We periodically make changes that allow us to display consistent view counts and accurately reflect a “real” view based on video consumption, video streaming and spam filtering. Unfortunately, a few people still try to artificially manipulate their video’s view counts. Some people game third-party view counts as well. That can make things unfair for everyone.

Recently, we found spamming issues associated with the view counts on a small number of videos. The inflated view count number on these videos will be frozen until actual views catch up to the published, artificial, view count. Also, a few people have commented that their view counts are updating more slowly. Occasionally the speed with which views update changes — sometimes it’s faster and sometimes it’s slower. But we are always working to make sure that the final view count numbers are an accurate reflection of the community’s interest.

In short, in the name of accuracy and fighting the dreaded video spammer, YouTube has departed from Google’s speed-first policy and slowed down the updating of view counts to allow for a thorough vetting of the numbers.

But, when technological fixes don’t exist, that doesn’t mean that there is nothing to be done.  Managing expectations and preparing your boss or client for this phenomenon well ahead of a launch can do wonders to keep folks from getting agitated or asking you to “fix the YouTube.”

If you’re in need of a positive spin, you may mention that many users speculate that long periods of stagnant video counts typically indicate that a video is quite popular and that its page has essentially been cached—served up without updates to save on processing power and load time.  This is a great way to take a technological bummer and turn it into reason to celebrate.