I gather we appeared on Torrent yesterday, the Canadian G4 tech TV series hosted by Amber MacArthur. (Gosh, wasn’t it great when we had a channel like that in the US?).

We knew we were going to appear, but weren’t sure when. The last few months have had more than our share of ups and downs, but we have a couple things in production, due out very soon, and I’ve got a brand-spanking new Macbook just itching to edit some video!

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I’ve had some comments and e-mails asking “where the heck is the next episode?” That’s a fair enough question.

During our trip to Taiwan, some of the plans we’d made went horribly awry. First, I had a series of technical problems that ruined a fair amount of the footage. (Lessons learned, one and all) Second, my father-in-law’s “High Speed” cable connection turned out to have the effective throughput of a 48K modem, which really fouled up John’s and my plans to develop and edit content simultaneously on two continents. It was difficult enough to upload photographs, transferring video was impossible.

We did produce some pieces, which will show up in later episodes.

Since my return, between work and a progressive series of cold and flus for myself and my family, time hasn’t been available.

However, with the new year, we’ve got a couple episodes lined up and I should be posting them shortly.

We really appreciate the support and feedback we’ve received so far. It makes it all worthwhile.

Thanks!

We’ve been holding off on the next episode until Quicktime 7 was officially released for Windows. It has now been released and can be downloaded at Apple’s Quicktime page. Of course, you can also use VLC to play the H.264 video streams.

During September, John will be out working on a movie shoot in Colorado (I had to back out for family reasons ) and I’ll be getting ready of a put-your-money-where-your-mouth-is vlogging tour of Taiwan. More on that in the episode when it is released. In the meantime, get your H.264 players ready.

Looks like the Quicktime 7 for Windows in still in beta (although now at Preview Release 3) but I’ve learned that VLC for Windows can play H2.64 encoded videos, so if you’re having trouble with Quicktime on the PC, give VLC a try.

You can find it at videolan.org. It’s great!

Mr. Sharp from Clint Sharp’s Blog an’ Vlog is dead on in his assessment of online video. Quality video content is coming when people get their niche marked out and begin to raise their production quality/value.

That’s why we started this site.

Incidentally, I won’t normally blog other people entries, but very seldom do I see an entry somewhere where someone so clearly “gets it.” Clint also has some good tech videos. Check them out.

Clint Sharp’s Blog an’ Vlog » Blog Archive » Why can’t bloggers understand text turned to video?

I recently received some questions from a potential viewer about our use of Quicktime, and it is enough of an issue that I wanted to address it in more detail.

Question: Why do you use H.264 codec? Where can I get it, all I can find is Quicktime 6.5?

Answer: H.264 is really, really cool. It’s produces amazing results. It can reduce a 1.85gb DV file to 150mb at full resolution with very little degradation of image quality and no visible problems with high-motion scenes. It is the coming standard for multimedia from cell phones up to High Definition TV.

We assemble this program on a Powermac using FinalCut Pro. Quicktime is the default format on a Mac, and QuickTime 7 has been available on the Mac for some time now, and in this case, H.264 is the best quality codec available to us.

The problem is that QT 7 hasn’t been officially released on the Windows platform. The Preview Release for Windows has been available for some time now, and it works well. We’re really surprised the final version hasn’t been released.

Meanwhile on the Apple site, the QT Preview Release is a little hard to spot, so here’s a direct link: Quicktime 7 for Windows Public Preview 2
The direct link for the Mac version is here: Quicktime 7

Depending on how things go, we might consider producing an XVID version if demand warrants it. In the meantime, thanks for being patient.

The Ninja Team Video Project is a new Internet video show. Digital video and broadband Internet are finally beginning to realize the long-anticipated democratization of video production and distribution.

While the tools are ever increasingly in the hands of the masses, the skills needed to produce quality video aren’t.

This show will feature lots of simple (and not-so-simple) tips and techniques to improve your video skills.

We are planning the first episode to be released in the second week in July.

We hope you enjoy it!