David Sayed's Microsoft Blog : NAB

The Secret Compressionist's Ball

dsayed — Thu, 22 May 2008 21:26:25 GMT

OK, so it wasn't secret and it wasn't a ball either but I couldn't resist the reference. Ben Waggoner hosted a party for video compressionists at NAB this year and I dragged myself there. I was feeling worse for wear not because of over-indulgences in Vegas, but rather the effects of a nasty 76 hour bug I came down with while on the way to Vegas. Coming off 5 hours of booth duty didn't help either. So... not as many videos as I'd like to have had, but we've got a couple of nice little interviews.

Promoscape

First is Tony Houghton from Promoscape in Port Melbourne, Australia. They have over 25 years of experience in the television and video industry and produce DVDs, on-air network promos, programming and pay-per-view DRM downloads.

MainConcept

Next up is Bruce Lidl from MainConcept based in Aachen, Germany. Bruce, however, prefers the sunnier climate of San Diego, California. MainConcept provides codecs for MPEG-2, MPEG-4, H.264, VC-1 and many others. They provide VC-1 codecs that work across different platforms.

If you want to be in the know about more of Ben's get togethers, please check out the wmtalk mailing list.

Microsoft NAB Booth Video

dsayed — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 03:31:00 GMT

Here's some video I shot around the Microsoft booth at NAB, focusing on Expression Encoder. You'll see Brandon, one of our very own Encoder program managers, in the middle of some exceptional demoing.

The video is of course hosted using the Silverlight Streaming Service and was encoded using Expression Encoder 2. The video was shot on a Canon HG-10 AVCHD camcorder, which records to hard drive. More on the editing process later.

New Pro-AVCHD Cameras

dsayed — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 17:58:04 GMT

I have a love/hate relationship with AVCHD. My little Canon HG10 is a hard-drive AVCHD high-definition camcorder. It is small, takes beautiful video, has a nice lens and generally does pretty much everything you could want from a consumer-grade device. What's not to like? The editing workflow. Quite simply it sucks. First of all, to get video out of it, you have to ensure that it is plugged into its charger, then connect it to your computer and copy the files over. If you're on a PC, the only good video editor I've found that will happily ingest AVCHD is Sony Vegas Pro 8 (there are other products that may work, I just like the power and interface of the Vegas product). On the Mac the story is more complicated. Final Cut Pro 2 requires you to preserve the entire directory structure of the camera otherwise it doesn't seem to know how to import the streams. My workaround is to regularly dump the entire contents of the camera hard drive to my Mac in folders called Tape 1, Tape 2, etc. One you've done that, you can use the Log and Transfer function to ingest the AVCHD footage and convert it to Apple's ProRes 422 intermediate codec. This is great, except that you're now locked into FCP (there is no ProRes codec on Windows). In both the Mac and Windows cases, ingesting the footage is not instantaneous, since it must be converted into something that is editable. Since AVCHD is a computationally intensive codec for decompression, this can take some time if you have a lot of footage. I have to say that at this point, the edge that AVCHD has over tape is its tapeless convenience. From a workflow standpoint it probably takes the same amount of time - if not longer - to ingest for editing on consumer grade computers as tape.

Anyway, I do think that the format is here to stay. Not a week seems to pass without a new consumer AVCHD device. But what about the pro end of the market? At NAB, Panasonic had their new AG-HMC70 shoulder-mount 3 CCD AVCHD camcorder (see picture) on display, which has an MSRP of $2495. While I like the shoulder-mounted form factor, I can't help thinking that there's a lot of air inside the camera since it just records to SDHC cards. Also, while it does have 3 CCDs, its highest bitrate for recording is 13Mbps, which doesn't compare favourably with the Canon HG10 (15Mbps) or the new Canon HF10 (17Mbps).

More interestingly, Panasonic were talking up their AVC-Intra 100 codec, which is billed as a professional intra-frame codec with bitrates of 100Mbps. More on this another time.

Expression Encoder at NAB

dsayed — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 07:22:31 GMT

We had a Microsoft Expression pod at the Microsoft booth and spent most of the time talking about Expression Encoder 2. This was the first opportunity for many people to actually see the new version of Expression Encoder and in some cases, the first time for them to see Expression Encoder at all! All the Microsoft folks who were there did a sterling job over the many hours that they were there doing demos, talking to customers, solving problems and generally spreading the word about the products.

We did end-to-end demos of Encoder - what the workflow looks like from ingesting a video to the finished result of Silverlight video uploaded to the Silverlight Live Streaming service - as well as feature deep dives. One particularly popular feature is live encoding, where you essentially have a studio switcher on your computer, enabling you to stream a programme and switch between various live and pre-recorded sources (see screen capture below).

Personally, I find these events great for two reasons:

I get to see how people respond to who we think we should be talking about the product.
I gain insights from real people about how they use products in the real world. There's nothing like a customer telling you to your face that you made a dumb decision by not doing XYZ to make it real.

NAB Report

dsayed — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 07:10:34 GMT

My first NAB is over and both my voice and feet are glad!

It was a good event - good for Microsoft, good for me in terms of making contacts and getting to know the industry a little bit better. NAB consists of a number of things: Demoing stuff at your booth, Checking out other booths, Setting up, missing, rescheduling and attending meetings, Standing in line for food, lavatories, taxis, etc. and Parties!

Out of the above, I missed the parties, not because I'm some kind of anti-social curmudgeon, but because I came down with a virus the Sunday I travelled to NAB. Apart from making me feel rubbish the entire time and helping me lose my voice, it also seemed to lead to a viral/medication-induced form of narcolepsy resulting in such hilarity as falling asleep in the parking lot of Fry's Electronics in Las Vegas for two hours, etc. But I digress...

Photo credit: Bob Townsend