Tag Archives: youtube

Romania Through Their Eyes

Romania Through Their Eyes – Laura Tonlaveur

I promised it, and kept my word. Just launched a new show of my own that’s been in the works for some time. It’s live, right now, on my YouTube channel.

The show is called “Romania Through Their Eyes”, and it’s a series of interviews with foreigners — people who visited Romania, spent time in the country, and wanted to share their thoughts with me.

Episode RTTE-001-FR-HD
Released 2/1/11

The purpose of the show is to get their impressions about the country, and start a dialogue which will lead to a greater understanding of the issues facing Romanians and Romania. I’m hoping this will have an impact on the leadership of the country, and help them to focus their attention on issues that are of international relevance. Because, let’s face it, Romania’s reputation in the world isn’t exactly spotless…

This first interview is with Laura, who is from the South of France, and spent two and a half months in Romania in the fall and winter of 2010.

Thanks to YouTube’s CC option, I can provide two language tracks (English and Romanian) for each show. You’ll have to excuse my translation, I’m doing my best and it may not be as accurate as I want it to be, but at least it’s there. If there’s a need for subtitles in another language, get in touch with me and we’ll work together to get them up there.

My current plans are to put out one episode per month. As you know, I already film, direct, edit and produce my wife’s two shows (Ligia’s Kitchen and Quilling – The Art of Paper Filigree). There’s a significant time commitment already devoted to them. And you wouldn’t believe how much work goes on behind the scenes for one of these interviews… But, as I say in the video, if there’s enough interest, I’ll be glad to roll up my sleeves and get to work on more frequent episodes, like bi-monthly ones, or even once a week, who knows. It’s up to you — so if you like it, spread the word, like it, fave it, share it, etc. — get the word out!

Thank you!

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Thoughts

What comes after High Definition?

Producing (set design, lighting, filming, directing, editing) my wife’s cooking show has gotten me thinking about what comes after HD, because there obviously is a large discrepancy in resolution between full 1080p HD and properly exposed 35mm film (up to 3500p) — as I already mentioned in my post on preserving classic movies.

Yes, high definition is a huge improvement over standard definition, which in turn was a large improvement over early television signals. But televisions and VCRs, in spite of their popularity, are a dismal failure in picture quality compared to what they replaced: film reels and projectors.

Nowadays, we’ve gained some foothold back when it comes to consumer/prosumer video quality. We have ready access to video cameras that will record in HD (at various qualities, given the model and the price), and we have newer computers and televisions that will allow us to play back those videos at their native (720p or 1080p) resolutions. Even websites have begun in recent years to allow us to play back HD videos, and the quality of broadband internet connections has increased to the point where one doesn’t have to wait a half hour or more in order to download/buffer an HD video and play it properly on their computer. We can even play back HD videos from the internet directly on our televisions, thanks to standalone or built-in media players.

But if we’re to get back to the quality of 35mm film and best it, we must keep moving forward. Thankfully, some visionaries have already taken the first steps and have come up with a camera that can record at a similar-to-film resolution: the RED One, which can give us 2300p of extremely high definition digital video. It’s not quite 3000p or 3500p (which would be the equivalent of properly exposed film), but it gets us pretty close, and it’s certainly much better than 1080p.

The RED camera captures each frame of video as a 12-bit RAW image, which means we, as videographers, have much greater freedom than before when editing the video, just like photographers do when they switch from JPG to RAW files. All of a sudden, white balance, exposure, recovery, blacks, vibrance, saturation, and tone adjustments can be made with much more accuracy.

One area where I’d love to see more improvement — although I’m sure it’ll come with time — is RED’s ability to capture more color depth, say 14-bit or 16-bit. Bit depth is still an area where improvement can be made across the board when it comes to digital cameras.

But let’s leave tech specs alone, and think about how we can edit and enjoy the videos we could make with a RED camera. That’s where difficulties come in, because you see, we still can’t properly do that, certainly not with consumer, and not even with prosumer equipment. No, we’d be looking at professional equipment and serious prices. The market just hasn’t caught up.

There are no computers that can display that kind of resolution at full screen, and there are no televisions that can do it, either. TVs and computers are still caught up in the world of 720p and 1080p. And to make things even more complicated, now we’ve got to worry about 3D video, which is nice for some applications, but from my point of view, it’s a distraction, because it adds yet another barrier, another detour, on the road to achieving proper video resolution across the board. Manufacturers, TV stations and filmmakers are jumping on the 3D bandwagon, when they should be worried about resolution.

So, what costs would a filmmaker be looking at if he or she wanted to shoot at the highest possible digital resolution available today (a RED setup)? I crunched some numbers, and mind you, these are just approximations. The costs are likely to be 1.5-2x that much when you account for everything you might need. On a side note, the folks at RED and at Final Cut Pro have worked together quite a bit to ensure that we can edit RED video natively, directly in Final Cut Pro, on a Mac. See this video for an overview.

  • RED One camera: $25,000
  • 35mm RED lens: $4,250
  • 18-85mm RED lens: $9,975
  • RED LCD: $2,500
  • RED CF media and cards: $1,500
  • RED rig: about $2,500
  • add extra $$$ for power, accessories, tripods, other media, etc.
  • RED video card, for encoding and editing video: $4,750
  • Mac Pro editing station: about $7,000-$12,000, depending on your needs, and you may need more than one of these, depending on how big your production is
  • 30″ display: about $1,000-$3,000, depending on your needs, and you may need more than one of these as well, depending on the number of workstations and your display setup
  • Final Cut Studio software: $1,000
  • HDD-based storage for editing and archival: $2,000-$20,000, depending on your needs
  • LTO tape or additional HDD-based storage for backup: costs will vary quite a bit here
  • Specialized cinema hardware and display for showing movies at full resolution: I have no idea what this costs, but it’s likely to go into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and not every cinema has it

So at a minimum, we’d be talking about an investment of more than $60,000 in order to work with a RED setup today.

But let’s not get tied up in talking solely about RED cameras. Clearly the entire industry needs to take steps in order to ensure that videos at resolutions greater than 1080p HD can be played across all the usual devices. Unfortunately, they’re still tied up in SD and HD video. Most TV channels still transmit in SD or lower-than-SD video quality (lower than 480p). It’s true, most have always transmitted at broadcast quality (500p or better) but we’ve always had to contend with a lot of signal loss. And nowadays, we still have to pay extra for HD channels, even though they should be the norm, and we should be looking forward.

To that effect, computer displays need to get bigger and better, computer hardware needs to get faster, computer storage needs to expand, media players need to increase their processing power, televisions need to get better and bigger, and broadband internet needs to get faster, ideally around the gigabit range (see this talk from Vinton Cerf on that subject), so that full resolution, 4000K video can move across the internet easily.

For now, if I were to start working on RED, I’d still have to output to 720p or 1080p and keep my full resolution originals archived for another day, somewhere in the future, when consumer-grade electronics have evolved to the point where they can play my videos and films natively.

I for one look forward to the day when YouTube starts to stream 3500p videos, and when we can all play them conveniently and at full resolution on our computers and televisions!

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Now I can upload longer videos to YouTube

On Friday, as I visited the Upload page at YouTube to put up another video, I noticed this announcement.

It says I’m now allowed to upload videos longer than 15 minutes. I checked the official YouTube blog, just to make sure, and it’s true. This past Thursday, they started to allow selected users to upload longer videos. According to the blog post, there are no limits on the video’s duration, though there’s still a 2 GB limit per video file size.

This is wonderful. Thank you, YouTube!

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YouTube’s copyright claim process still needs some work

A while back, I edited and uploaded what I thought was a fairly innocuous video to YouTube, called A walk on Dania Beach. You can see it below. It shows a few clips of the beach that I took during two walks with my wife. It’s nothing special, really. The quality of the video isn’t even that good, because the camera I used at the time compressed the video too much.

Because there was a lot of wind noise from the in-camera microphone, I muted the sound on some portions of the video, and used the stock surf sound that ships with iMovie (as part of iLife).

You may or may not know (depending on whether you use a Mac) that the sounds that ship with iLife are free to use as you like in your videos, podcasts, presentations, etc. You paid for them when you purchased the software. While their creators retain copyright, in essence, by purchasing iLife, you have gained a license to use them as you see fit in your work.

And so I do use them, all the time. Many of the videos I uploaded to my YouTube channel contain either a sound or a clip from the iLife library, in order to enhance the video’s presentation. So far, so good.

Imagine my surprise when YouTube promptly informed me that this particular video contained copyrighted audio, and that I was welcome to file a copyright claim if I wanted to dispute their findings. They identified two entertainment companies, Go Digital and WMG, as the potential copyright holders. I did file a dispute, where I stated that I didn’t use their content. It took a few weeks, but their replies were finally posted.

GoDigital confirmed its claim to the sound recording, and WMG agreed with my dispute. It’s interesting to see that WMG, the far larger company, agreed with me, while GoDigital, a company I’ve never heard of, maintained their claim… to what? That’s really the question I’d like to ask them, but I can’t, because this is as far as I can go with YouTube’s claim dispute process.

If you’d like to learn how YouTube identifies potentially copyrighted material (video or audio) in the videos its users upload to the site every day, Margaret Stewart, YouTube’s head of user experience, gave a talk at TED about that very subject in June of this year.

Now that you’ve presumably watched that video and you understand how YouTube scans and identifies potential copyrighted assets, I’d still like to find out exactly what GoDigital sees in my not-so-special video that it thinks it owns. The sound of the waves I recorded with my camera? The sound of the waves from the iLife library? The seagulls I recorded? The sound of the wind, also recorded by me? What is it they think they own?

If someone at YouTube’s user experience team reads this, please, either enlighten me, or introduce an extra step in the copyright dispute process that allows the user to ask what particular piece of content was identified as copyrighted, or allows the company to specify it directly when they review the dispute and decide it’s still theirs. Then, for those special cases like mine, where I don’t see how the content is theirs, allow me to request a third-party review, by a human at YouTube, someone who could have a look at the video and see what’s going on.

Thanks.

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YouTube and music publishers: a model for revenue sharing

One of the videos I uploaded to YouTube recently was identified as using copyrighted music. I’d used a song from the 50s, thinking that after 60 years, no one would give a hoot whether that song was being used as a track in a YouTube video. Still, it was identified by YouTube’s content ID program and pointed out to me.

Leaving aside the discussion of music copyrights in the US, which is absolutely insane, given that even 70-year old songs still aren’t public domain, I’d like to propose a model for revenue sharing among YouTube users and music publishers. It’s quite simple, and allows for easy licensing and monetization of music tracks. If implemented, I dare say it would also increase the revenues of music publishers quite a bit.

Here’s how it would work:

  1. Music publishers use YouTube’s content ID program to identify potential matches between their catalogs and YouTube videos, same as they’re already doing.
  2. Potential copyright issues will continue to be identified, same as they are right now.
  3. Videos won’t be restricted, as they are now, but will continue to play in all geographical locations, for every YouTube user, accumulating views.
  4. If the videos are successful and accumulate over 10,000 views, they will be invited into YouTube’s revenue sharing program.
  5. Once they start making money through that program, a portion of that money will go to the music publishers who own the licensing rights for that particular song or piece of music. I wouldn’t mind paying up to 25% of the profits from a video to a music publisher if I chose a particular song I loved for my video, and my video was successful. Besides, I wouldn’t have to actually “pay” myself. YouTube would automatically distribute the revenues accordingly.

The best part of this is that the process is fair, doesn’t punish anyone, and benefits all involved. If a video is successful, then it pays, and if it only gets a few hundred views, who cares if uses a song that should be licensed? If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear it, does it still make a sound? Does it matter?

Prosecuting individuals in this day and age, when the practice of adding songs to videos is so widespread, is terribly inefficient, and fosters ill-will. Why not use existing technology and platforms to add value, make money and foster goodwill?

The two areas where I see some tweaking will be needed are in the correct identification of music tracks, where the dispute/review process will need to be made easier and faster, and in the use of a sliding scale to calculate the percentage due to the publishers for the user of their songs, based on the song’s popularity and relevance. But those are minor things given the immense potential of this model to revolutionize the way we look at music copyright disputes on YouTube.

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