The Fast Turnaround of Web Video
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It's amazing to me how technology has increased to the point that you can get video out to the masses with lighting speed. I'm not talking about the Flip cameras that encode on the fly then download to your computer ready for uploading to YouTube. That's fine if you want zero production values, but you can still crank out quality with a few simple tools.
First you'll want any flavor of HD camera. These are a little more expensive, but YouTube's HD conversion looks really, really good if you have a computer that can play it smoothly. Even consumer grade HD cams (like the $600 Canon HF100) produce a nice image that looks almost as nice when encoded properly. Within a couple of years all computers (and TVs for that matter) will be playing HD content off of the web and those pictures are very pretty when compared to old Standard Defintion.
Once you've edited your footage (we use Sony Vegas), simply encode it at 1280 x 720 resolution, even if you've shot it at higher resolution. This tells the Tube that it's High Def. I like the .wmv fomat because you get the highest quality vs. file size. With a 1 GB file size limit, you'll hit the time wall first (10 minutes, tops) before you ever eclipse that memory ceiling.
Then all you have to do is upload. This may take a bit (and then you have to wait for YouTube to convert to crummy flash video before the HD encoder kicks in), but it's all done within a couple of hours (depending on length and size).
So there you go. Create something great and it's available to the world on the same day. Whoever heard of such a thing?
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