I’ve been live streaming various events for small organizations for a while. Most recently for the Against the Stream Meditation Center in SF (if you’re into mindfulness meditation and dharma talks check it out on Monday’s at 7:30pm PST). Meditation centers don’t usually have a ton of money so we needed to figure out how to do things relatively cheaply. In the past I’ve used Ustream for other organizations, but they’re expensive. Especially for a non-profit. Note: This assumes you want to do a relatively professional looking stream. If you’re just looking to stream you playing a video game or something there are even cheaper ways to do it. This article doesn’t cover that though. (although YouTube is still a great choice for that) Looking around for alternatives I discovered that YouTube now does live streaming. For free. I’m usually skeptical of free offerings but they have been fantastic. Quality, analytics, control have all been on par with what I’m used to with Ustream, if not better. If you want to put up paid content then Ustream has some advantages but it’s very expensive. If you’re just trying to live stream your user group, meditation, or whatever meeting then I highly recommend taking a look at YouTube. (in YouTube go to Video Manager and then select Live Streaming. See image below) So that takes care of one big component, the delivery network. YouTube: FREE (YouTube records everything and then posts it after you’re done. If you’re doing test streams, make sure you turn that function off. Had an mildly embarrassing test video get posted accidentally) Let’s talk about software. Currently I use Wirecast Studio. This is great software for streaming productions. You can have overlays, animated lower thirds, multiple cameras, multiple audio streams, etc. It’s really a great live production environment and works with virtually every CDN (content delivery network). It’s also $500. If you’re doing a serious production it’s worth it though. HOWEVER, with YouTube you can get Wirecast Play for free. Yep, once again FREE. This is a bit more limited, you can only have one camera (which is just fine for most small events), there’s no preview (whatever you select immediately goes live) and it only works with YouTube. However, if you’re only streaming on YouTube… not really a problem. It’s FREE and does have many of the features of it’s big, $500 brother. It also only works with Black Magic capture cards, so that’s another potential big limitation of Play. (see further down for the hardware I recommend) So, software: FREE (you can buy Wirecast Play Studio for $279. This is the $500 app restricted to YouTube. If you can afford it, I highly recommend this. The ability to Preview is kind of a big deal. But play with the free version and see how that works for you.) A screenshot of Wirecast Studio is below. As you can see below it looks much like a normal video editing app, so it’s very intuitive. (and yes, if they ever allow plugins we’d love to port Beauty Box Video to it 🙂 And now we get to Hardware. Hardware is not usually free unfortunately. So this is where the expenses come in. However you’ll see it won’t be too bad, other than maybe the computer. You’ll need a computer. I sort of recommend MacBook Pros. Macs still handle audio/video stuff with less problems than their PC counterparts. Apple unfortunately isn’t very generous with the hardware though, so small disks and limited RAM can create bottlenecks. If you don’t need the machine to be portable and can use a desktop machine, you’re better off. If you’re pretty tech savvy, then a PC is fine. Just realize they can be more finicky when it comes to getting video in. (although Windows is getting better) I’ll go over various problems with the software and hardware in part 2 of this. There are lots of quirks to getting video into a computer and getting it to spit it out to the interwebs, so it needs it’s own blog post. The MacBook Pro has less quirks, so that’s the machine of choice for me. Internet Connection: You have to have pretty fast internet (bare minimum is 1megabit Upload speed) and expect to use a wired connection. Do NOT use Wifi. Wifi is relatively unstable, slower and you’re much more likely to have problems. Run a cable directly into your modem or router. It will definitely help if other people are not using the connection. Having someone start watching Netflix while you’re trying to stream will not go well. Having your connection constantly dropping really sucks and makes for a lot of stress. Get a fast connection, wire straight from your modem to the computer and kick everyone else off the line. Much more likely to have a good stream for your viewers and less stress for you. Internet Connection: $50/mo (give or take) Computer: MacBook Pro for $1600 (If you can use a desktop Mac/PC or laptop PC then the cost will be much less. I recommend buying the other bits first and trying everything out with an existing computer. If you can use your existing computer so much the better.) Video Capture Card: Blackmagic Design Intensity Shuttle: This is what I use. It works well with the Mac but requires Thunderbolt. It took a bit of time to get it set up and find the right setting to get it to work with the Panasonic camcorder I use. From my experience and most accounts, it’s very finicky. Expect to spend some time setting it up and possibly calling Black Magic (who were very helpful and got me up and running but other folks have reported having less positive experiences). Frankly there aren’t a lot of other good, inexpensive solutions. So even though it’s not perfect, once you get it set up, it does work and will only set you back about $230. There’s also a USB 3.0 version which I have not tried. Video
Beauty Box Video or Photo Crashing Problems – How to Fix It
Beauty Box makes extensive use of your video card’s GPU (graphic processing unit) to speed the plugin up. Usually this works great and results in the plugin working quickly. However, it can cause problems. The GPU has a lot less memory than your computer does, so it’s prone to run out of memory. This is especially true when other applications are trying to use it. After Effects, Premiere, Final Cut, and most of the other apps we plug into also use the GPU. So do many other plug-ins. All this software trying to make use of a limited resource can be problematic. Older video cards are also a problem. Beauty Box is doing some heavy duty processing and the older video cards may not be up to the task. Particularly if you’re using very high resolution video or photos. So what to do about it? Here’s some fixes:
Creative Cloud from a Software Design Perspective
The Creative Cloud has gotten mixed reviews from users. Many users don’t like the idea of ‘renting’ software and feel Adobe is forcing them to pay more or gouging them. While this may or may not be true, there are other reasons for Adobe wanting to make this switch. Software is traditionally done in big releases. You work for a year or more and deliver the final product with much fanfare. This is a feast or famine type of thing… users get all or nothing and the company bets the farm that the release is all that and a bag of potato chips. This really isn’t great for either users or the company.
All Installers are Updated for Creative Cloud
We’ve finally got all of our installers updated to recognize Adobe’s Creative Cloud. All of our plugins worked in CC, but you needed to point the installer to the right directory. We weren’t finding it automatically. Now we are! 🙂 Actually this only affects the Photoshop Mac installers. The Windows installers look for the last version of the app you installed. If that was CC, then that’s what it would find. The Mac installers look for every installation of the app, so we have to specifically tell it to look for each new version. Probably more info than you wanted, but for those of you, uh, enjoying Creative Cloud… all of our products will install easily.
Beauty Box Video 3.0 Released!
The new version of Beauty Box Video for After Effects, Premiere, and Final Cut Pro 7/X is available for purchase or you can download the trial version. We’ve added a number of great new features, first and foremost is greatly improved automatic masking. This allows us to more accurately identify the skin tones and track them throughout the video clip. This means the retouching that Beauty Box does looks better than ever. Here’s an example: No automatic mask is perfect, we’re still picking up a bit of the background, but it’s much improved from 1.0 The other big new feature is the addition of preset Styles. It ships with 35 different styles to give your video a wide variety of different looks from a warm glow to a ‘day to night’ look. These are modifiable, so you can adjust the amount of smoothing up or down. We’ve also improved the shine removal, improved the OpenCL support, so it should be faster on most cards, and made a bunch of other small improvements and bug fixes. It’s a great upgrade and until June 30th it’s only $59 for Beauty Box 2.0 users ($99 for 1.0 users). New licenses are also on sale for only $149 (save $50!). To purchase head over to the Digital Anarchy store. If you want to download the free trial and get more info, click here. Oh, and if you’re wondering what happened to OpenFX support… we’re adding NUKE support and the OpenFX version will be released in a couple weeks. At the same time, we’ll also be releasing a brand new version for Avid systems! You can download the beta of both the OpenFX and Avid builds here.
Greenscreen Tips for Shooting Video
There was a question the other day on the After Effects List about tips for successfully shooting greenscreen. A couple good links were suggested (see below), but one that stood out was rotating the video camera vertically. If you’re shooting a person standing, and they’re going to be keyed anyways so you don’t need the extra space horizontally, use the wide part of the camera to capture more vertical resolution. It was also a reminder that shooting greenscreen is difficult even for pros. Great tips from Jonas Hummelstrand: http://generalspecialist.com/greenscreen-and-bluescreen-checklist/ and from the After Effects Help section! http://adobe.ly/RNe3pz More vertical resolution, anyone?
The Future of Photography
CES/PMA is having a mini-conference called the Future Imaging Summit. I’m on the panel on software, so I’ve been pondering what software is going to look like in five years, at least as it pertains to photography. I’d love to hear your thoughts on where you think it’s going to be and what you expect. Do you want a Canon 5D markV running Android and apps? Do you want it easier to add metadata like keywords? Editing in the cloud? 3D photos? (god forbid 😉 It will be interesting to see what kind of changes happen to photography over the next five years. One trend that will definitely
Using Plugins on Multiple Computers
So you’ve got two (or 20) computers and you want to use Beauty Box (or whatever) on all of them. This is always a tricky thing for software developers. On one hand we realize many folks have multiple machines and since they’re only one person, they can only use one machine at a time. We would like to allow them the flexibility of having it on a couple machines. On the other hand, if you’re a studio with multiple machines and multiple people we think that if our software is good enough to be installed and used on all those machines we should be paid for it. Making sure that happens sometimes gets in the way of how a single user is using our plugins. Companies When you buy a license of our software, you’re buying it for one user. If you’re a company with multiple machines and multiple artists/editors using those machines, then there’s not much gray area and you need a license for each computer being used. We offer pretty good volume discounts and site licenses for this type of situation, you can contact sales@digitalanarchy.com for pricing. There is one big exception to this… if you’re using After Effects’ network rendering. You do not need extra licenses for After Effects render nodes. You can install Beauty Box on as many render nodes as you want for free. People (and, no, companies are not people. I don’t care what the Dread Pirate Roberts says) If you’re just one person with multiple machines then there’s some gray areas. The software can be installed on a couple machines, but we use the internet to determine if the plugin is being used on multiple computers at the same time. So if you have a desktop and a laptop and you’re using one or the other depending on whether you’re at home or at the office, no problem. You’re good to go. However, if you’re in your studio/office and trying to use both machines for rendering/editing at the same time, you may run into problems. If so, here’s what you can do: 1) You can purchase a second license. We do offer discounts for second licenses. Contact sales@digitalanarchy.com. 2) Use the second machine as an After Effects render node. As mentioned above, you can use Beauty Box on as many render nodes as you want for free. So if the machine is just being used to process frames sent to it from another machine you shouldn’t have any problems. 3) Our licensing is set up so that you can install on two machines, they just can’t be in use simultaneously. The way we check this is via the internet. So if you disable the internet connection on one machine, then we can’t check it. This is a hack and technically violates the license. However, since the spirit of the license is for one user, as long as it’s the same person using the machines we’re ok with it. 4) Render out the Beauty Box clip on one machine while working on another part of your project on the second machine. BB just gets watermarked on the second machine, so it’s still usable. Like most of you, we’re running a small company. We try to be as flexible as possible, but if you’re making money using our software we would like you to buy the correct number of licenses. Please support the companies that make the tools you use and that help you be successful.
Sony Makes a Funny Video Making Fun of DSLR Users
Sony has come out with a pretty funny video about DSLR users who really shouldn’t be using a DSLR. The campaign is called: DSLR Gear, No Idea. One has to ask… What is Sony going for here? This is only funny if you know something about DSLRs. The camera they’re advertising is a point and shoot with some fancy features, but they’re pretty much insulting the people they want to buy their camera. Seems like an odd teaser campaign… but it is funny!
Why You Shouldn’t Shoot Video with a DSLR
(This is a very old post. Obviously DSLRs have improved so you can stop leaving comments) There’s a myth going around that DSLRs shoot great video footage. They don’t. They are not video cameras and as such, usually result in sub-par video. If you want to shoot video, go buy a video camera. Stop listening to the cool kids telling you to shoot video on your non-video camera DSLR. It is true that if you hook up a really nice lens to your DSLR and learn all the things that a video camera does that a DSLR doesn’t do (and that you now have to do manually)… you might get really beautifully looking footage. If you are an experienced videographer and/or filmmaker, you can get brilliant footage out of a DSLR. If you’re not an experienced videographer, the footage is just as likely going to be shaky, out of focus, and have bad audio. (Of course, some might say that if you’re not an experienced videographer your footage is going to look like that no matter what camera you use. 😉 For the types of stuff most people are shooting on DSLRs, a sub-$2000 video camera, like the Canon XA10, will probably serve them much better. Actually, $800 handhelds are often more than most people need. I’ve got a Panasonic that shoots absolutely beautiful HD. I know, I know… it’s not as cool, but for most things, even stuff that Pro Video guys shoot, you need to jump through hoops to get a DSLR to do what you want. For example, it’s doubtful I’d let someone with a DSLR rig shoot my wedding. IMHO it’s not the appropriate camera for the job. Most people using a DSLR to shoot a wedding are probably trying waaaay too hard to be a ‘filmmaker’ and probably not as focused on just shooting my wedding. Besides, I really don’t want someone wearing a rig that looks like an orthodontic headset for Frankenstein wandering around my wedding. Using a DSLR to shoot video is sometimes an endeavor worthy of Dr. Frankenstein. (Of course, if you’re into creating a monster, the RedRock DSLR rig shown is a good one) All that said… it is possible to get great footage out of a DSLR and you get to use all those super awesome lenses. The gist of this post is to get you thinking about the hype that surrounds DSLRs and video. The cameras have a LOT of shortcomings that most people are going to find difficult to workaround, even video pros that are used to higher end camcorders. Before you go running off trying to use a DSLR for video, consider what you’re shooting and what you want to achieve. Examine the features that DSLRs are lacking, how that will affect what you’re shooting, and what you will have to buy to compensate for the missing video features. Use that as a guide to determine whether you should spend the time and money on outfitting your DSLR to shoot video or just buying a video camera that’s designed for video from the ground up.
Joy of Photography
One of the great things about running DA is that it gives me an excuse to buy fancy camera equipment and play with it. The latest subject I’m infatuated with is stars. No, I haven’t joined the paparazzi. I’m talking about the stars you can see when you’re 10,000 feet up on a rock in the middle of the Pacific ( the Haleakala volcano in Maui). Photography is absolutely amazing. It really forces you to be present in the place you’re at and the moment you’re there.
Argh, Matey! Pirates!
Once every year or two something happens to make me get a bug up my shorts about piracy. Generally I don’t care much about it… most piracy is done by college students, software ‘collectors’ (people that just download it to have it but don’t use it), and other people that wouldn’t buy the software anyways. We recently had the technical guy at a photography studio give us a call. Their primary business is doing greenscreen photography for clients and they use Primatte for it. He called to complain that they had recently upgraded to Primatte 5.0 and that he gets an error message when he tries to run it on all his machines. All of Digital Anarchy’s software looks for other instances of the plugin running on a network and shuts down if it sees a copy with the same serial number. This studio, which makes their living doing greenscreen, had one serial number. In his words “We have Primatte 3 installed on all our machines and never had a problem, but now it looks like we’ll have to buy more licenses. Why?”.
