This first video on Sell to Camera is a short test I recorded to show you the difference in quality between a good webcam and a HD camcorder. This gives a first taste of the quality we can achieve with our business videos.

Image: Short test video showing the difference in quality between a typical webcam and a HD digital camcorder. The video was shot with natural lighting in an office environment. [If your RSS reader doesn’t show the YouTube video embedded above then please visit the original post in your browser.]

The plan

For this test I put my office clock on a chair and zoomed in to better capture the moving second hand. This shows the sort of zoom levels needed for close-ups in an office setting; the sort that we need for a ”hello” type web video.

Lighting

My office is north-facing and has no direct sunlight. It was late in the afternoon and lighting levels were low. Apart from the ceiling light there was no other lighting.

Webcam

I set my Logitech Quickcam Pro 9000 webcam to record at 1600×1200 resolution. The image is large but the quality is poor at this zoom and light level. The frame rate is 12.5 frame per second (fps); too slow for smooth movement in live video.

HD Camcorder

The second image is from my Canon LEGRIA HF S10 high definition camcorder. I literally put the camera on a tripod, turned it on and pressed record. The default image size is 1440×1080 (the largest is 1920×1080: full HD). The frame rate is 25fps as this is a European PAL camera (and not the US NTSC version which records at 30fps).

Editing

The webcam output was in WMV format and the camcorder output in AVCHD format.  I brought both media files into Sony Vegas Movie Studio v9 Platinum Edition to edit into the video. I trimmed the tracks, added the titles and a transition between the two recordings. For this test I did no colour correction or any other content edits or adjustments.

Rendering

From Sony Vegas I rendered the edited movie into AVI format at 640×480 and 25fps. AVI is uncompressed, so the quality is high but comes at the price of size. This video runs for 18 seconds; even so, Sony Vegas took 75 seconds to create the AVI file; which, at 543MB in size, works out to 30MB per second. It is a good thing that large disks are now so cheap!

Encoding

The next step was to encode the AVI file into a Flash Video (FLV) file for playing on the web. For this I used Sorenson Squeeze 5 for Flash Pro for with the high-quality MainConcept H.264 codec. On my Intel Core Duo desktop (2.4Ghz, 4GB RAM) the encoding batch job took around 58 seconds create a 3.6MB MP4 file ready for uploading.

Hosting

To improve streaming performance and to keep bandwidth costs down the MP4 file is not hosted on my web hosting account. Instead, I host the MP4 file on the Amazon S3 cloud storage platform. A DNS entry for the media sub domain means that any files referenced at http://media.selltocamera.com are actually coming from my S3 account.

Playing

As mentioned in my earlier post on how video embedding works, a flash player is required to actually display the flash video file. For this example I am using the JW FLV Media Player. This is a widely used player with extensive plugin support, including metrics on how long each video is watched.

If you are reading this in your RSS feed reader and cannot see the video at the start then please read the post on the website. Thanks.

Resolutions

The video is initially displayed on the blog at 512×384 pixels (4:3 format). You can see the high quality 640×480 version by clicking on the “show full screen” button.

Coming up

So, there we are: the very first video published on Sell to Camera I think you will agree that a webcam does not have anything like good enough quality for creating professional web videos for your business.

In the up-coming posts I will cover all these steps in more detail, talking about concrete steps to create you own web videos. It is not as complicated as it might look at first glance, and is easily within the technical ability and budget of most businesses.