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Podcasting Design

Publishing

Once you have your episodes done, you need to compress them for the world to see. To compress our footage, we use a mixture of Apple’s Compressor (because we can export easily from Final Cut Pro Studio), Adobe’s Media Encoder (Easy Flash export), and Telestream’s Episode Pro (Total control).

Audio podcasts are compressed to MP3s for clients. We only use AAC for our own podcasts because we don’t like using formats that aren’t extensible. We loose some listeners because of this but we have one solid format instead of many bad ones.

Video compression has become easier over time. H.264 is quickly becoming the standard for both Quicktime and Flash. This makes the compression process much easier. While the transition is not complete (we still compress individually for Quicktime and Flash), we’re not very far from a unified video standard (or as close as we are bound to get). We get many inquiries as to how we get small file sizes. There are many answers but the most prevalent is Keyframe spacing. This is typically set to 24. We usually set this to 100-200 for lock-off studio work and 50 for field work. This will cut the size of the videos in half. It will still drop natural keyframes for edits but you will pay much less in filesize from cut to cut.

Video size also a prickly subject. There are more than enough formats for TV and Film alone – and there even more for the Web. Pretty much every resolution is “legal” which makes it the wild wild west. For the sake of sanity, we’ve begun to standardize on two sizes - 640x360 and 960x540. 640x360 is basically the largest size you can play on an iPhone and 960x540 is the maximum size most people will be able to resolve on their computer. By the way, 960x540 is essentially Square Pixel Standard Definition (720x540) but at 16x9. It’s very hard to see the difference between this size and 1280x720 on screens less than 37” from our tests. The one caveat is that if you want something to show up as “HD” on YouTube, you need to submit at a minimum of 1280x720 (even though YouTube HD plays back at, you guessed it, 960x540). Our internal pipe operates at 1080p 24 fps so this is just a choice of output. Progressive, by the way, is important because computers display interlace footage badly.

Now that you have your show. You need to find somewhere to put it. There are two very large outlets and then a myriad of other options. iTunes and YouTube are the largest options. They command probably 70% of the market. Here are some of the pros and cons of the process…

iTunes:

Pros:

• You can use any Quicktime format at any size Quicktime supports.
• You control the compression
• Subscription to peoples computer and iPods/iPhones is effortless
• Audience is conditioned to episodic products

Cons:

• You are responsible for Bandwidth (if you become popular, it can be a sizable amount).
• Smaller market than YouTube
• Competing with paid content
• Works best if you have an iPod

YouTube:

Pros:

• Massive Audience. If you hit it big…it can be millions of viewers
• You are covered on the bandwidth. If 1 million people download your video, it’s on YouTube’s dime.
• Experimental Audience

Cons:

• You have to let YouTube compress and define the format
• Downloading from YouTube is still in testing (hard to get to iPod)
• Audience not conditioned to come back for more episodes.
• Audience can be hostile. They are used to a certain kind of content and can react badly to more refined productions.

If you choose to upload to iTunes, you will need to serve your videos somewhere. The easiest place to do this (while still controlling your compression) is Libsyn/Wizzard Media. For a flat, reasonable rate, you can put your videos online and into iTunes. Libsyn manages the RSS feed, bandwidth, etc. If you are just getting started, this is a great option. Once you get moving and want higher performance, you can move up to Libsyn Pro or Cachefly.

Beyond YouTube and iTunes there are other great services like Blip.tv and Vimeo.com who will manage bandwidth for you (and help promote your work). If you are doing How-to stuff, you can also look at sites like Howcast.com which is working to monetize this kind of content.

No matter what way you go, it’s worth going there. This is an exciting new field in it’s infancy. It may take some time to make money here but if it was easy, everyone would be doing it (and they will be soon enough).

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