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MillimeterBattle of the Broadbands
Feb 28, 2006 12:44 PM, S.D. Katz
Over the years I have shared feature, commercials and visual effects projects with clients across the country and also around the globe. Collaborators in China, Japan and Australia, New York and L.A. have all reviewed work after downloading movie files. Time zones are a challenge, but as most anyone in production knows, it’s a lot faster then Fed Ex.
But even with FTP sites that can handle large files, sending video over the Internet is far from perfect. The big problem, of course, are download times. Even over broadband pipes, downloads times are annoying when moving reasonably big files. In addition, Encoding files for minimum size and maximum quality is time consuming—a forgivable problem if viewers get to watch broadcast or HD quality movies.
Over the years most of us in production have become used to evaluating quarter screen files with noticeable artifacts. Still, for all the drawbacks, it is frequently the fastest way to get feedback from clients or collaborators and because of new encoding solutions and faster broadband connections streaming and downloading is about to get much, much better.
Postproduction studios may have T2 or even T3 connections but most boutique shops and smaller operations rely on broadband connections, typically a DSL or cable line. Over the past several years these connections have maxed out at download speeds of 5 to 10Mbps. This works out to about 1MB/sec with potential hiccups along the way. Uploads are usually one quarter that speed or less.
A harbinger of things to come, Northeast based cable company, Cablevision, recently increased their download speed 50% for some subscribers with a full rollout to be completed by the middle of 2006. This speed increase is a free system upgrade. Cablevision is also offering a premium service of 50Mbps up from 10Mbps (15Mbps with the free upgrade), a five-fold increase over their original standard service for an added fee of $14.95.
Verizon and other phone companies are readying similar performance offerings, so depending on where you live, the ball game has changed for using the Internet as a way to work with clients and show your work to clients. A friend of mine in production has already received Cablevision’s premium service and we both went online to test download speeds. Our first benchmark was the diagnositic site: http://jlab4.jlab.org:7123/ (two more diagnostic test sites are listed at the bottom of the article). Go there and check out your service provider’s connection speed.
The site measures both download and upload speeds and the test takes a few seconds to perform. My upgraded connection clocked in at 8.95 Mbps, close to the 10Mbps I expected. The Speakeasy test offers tests for major cities and since this raises the issue of server speed and the switches you data passes through when traveling across the country, it becomes obvious that speed varies considerably depending on where the data ends up. Naturally, the recipient of anything you put on your site depends on their connection.
I’ve checked several times over the past few days and performance varies depending on the city. My friend with the premium service, measured the performance of the new Cablevision premium service to NYC at 29Mbps, slower then the five-fold top speed, but approximately triple the speed of the older service.
Numbers don’t tell you the experiential performance and so we chose a couple of video download tests. The first was at X3 the preview movie site for the next X-Men movie due out in the Spring. This is hosted on the Apple Trailer site which is clearly state of the art hosting with Quicktime trailers of X3. HD trailers are the highlight of the site including 480p 720p and 1080p downloads encoded in MPEG-4 .264. The HD trailers look remarkable, but the pre-load time for full size 1920 x 1080 movies is about 15 seconds and it still tends to stall out when streaming on my dual proc G4. It plays fine after the full download. The smaller HD trailer is an acceptable experience, with a 10 second pre-load delay and then smooth playback throughout the trailer while streaming. Not bad, but the delay is annoying.
My friend with the latest Cablevision service had very different results: the 1080p HD movie played instantly. Yes, instantly: 1920 x 1080 video with no appreciable artifacts, stereo sound and smooth playback. This has huge implications for video production companies. Showing your movies in HD on your site will be increasingly possible over the next few years. The good news is that you likely customers at corporations, ad agencies and the media savvy are likely to be early adopters. The battle for customers between the telcos and cable companies is in high gear with Verizon, Bell South and others aggressively squaring off against cable operators. Naturally, you will have to wait for the faster connections to reach your area, but right now you can begin getting ready by learning how to encode HD using Sorenson 4.3 with On2 or MPEG-4. Flash 8 is the current standard for video performance and overall site presentation using the On2 encoder.
We’ll have an encoding article in VS shortly, covering the preparation of files and the real in and outs of Internet video. My experience has been that most production companies are about two years behind the technology when it comes to online presentations—It’s a common foible among overworked studios to postpone updating their site and show reel. I frequently see tiny movie trailers at production studio sites operating well below the current level of technology.
For sheer download speed for the masses, but at the cost of less then pristine quality, go check out Google’s video service, video.google.com where movies pop up and play instantly on a broadband connection. This opens up the other exciting aspect of the faster broadband connections: selling your content to the consumer directly or through a broker such as iTunes or Google. We’ll be looking at this in Video systems so stay tuned.
There are many factors that go into successful online video presentation including the viewer’s computer, their connection and the server dishing out video on the provider’s side. With a little work, you can graduate from business card sized movies to HD presentations with a modest commitment of time. The promises made by tech companies and VC’s back in the late nineties are about to be fulfilled.
TEST SITES:
- http://jlab4.jlab.org:7123/
- http://www.speakeasy.net/speedtest/
- http://speed3.optonline.net/speedcheck.html?sid=1140567790(for Optimum online subscribers)
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.