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Tweaking

I seem to be in “tweaking” mode…

After changing the site from hand-coded to database driven and getting feedback from Feedback Army (highly recommended), I’m adding salt and throwing in pepper.

A good comment from the Feedback Army was suggesting adding time of movie under each image. Good idea. Done. BTW – a very good reference on CSS is CSS Mastery by Andy Budd. Highly recommended.

Another comment was to add a bit more on the About/Contact page. Done.

Other comments… “go to Flash”.. Fuggedaboutit! “Group your videos”… not needed. “commercialize the site”… yeah, right, I’ll get right on that.

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Usability Help

A extremely helpful service from Feedback Army is the ability to ask for feedback from a number of users. The cost is low, typically $1 per user and the advice from my limited sample of 1 time was well-worth the cost.

I wanted to know if my wellys.org site was intuitive and easy to use. Yes, quite easy was the feedback.

Was the performance acceptable? Yes, no issues.

What should I change? Very little.

So two thoughts, one, I’m happy I have no issues and two, am I happy with the feedback because I have no issues? Probably.

I did receive feedback that I won’t take. Such as adding Flash for playback because Quicktime is “an old format now” and “not a format of the masses”. Good point and I’m not interested in the masses, thank you very much.

The feedback was quick. I had responses in less than 10 minutes and within 1 hour, I had 5 helpful responses.

Highly recommended!

PS: Read the FAQ and the Usability sections, both are well-written and help you to gain the best results.

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FCP 7 and ProRes

FCP 7 introduces a 3 new HD codecs for production work, ProRes 4444, ProRes 422 (LT) and ProRes 422 (Proxy). With these additions, this brings to five versions of HD codecs  available for production work. I did a simple comparison of Flip H.264 transcoding to all 5 versions, knowing full well that I wasn’t starting with the best source material.

The only version where I could see a difference was with ProRes 422 (Proxy). There were artifacts and a loss of detail. LT looked great, with no perceptible differences on up to 4444. Which means given the source, the best I could use is LT. That said, I did have striking differences in gamma between the new codecs looking identical to the source material and the “older” codecs, 422 and 422 (HQ) being much darker and losing details in the shadows.

I’ve tried to understand the gamma shift issue regarding H.264 and QT… this looks to add more confusion to the mix.

For me, going forward,  I’ll transcode the Flip to ProRes 422 (LT) then use it in FCP. I still need to test using ProRes 422 (LT) in iMovie.

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Thanks, Norman!

I was thinking this, and was going to write about it but I didn’t have the depth of experience to make the point as clear as Norman does.

In his blog, Hollyn-wood (Norman, that is), Norman makes the point that the price cuts and the focus on ease of use sets this upgrade to Final Cut Pro/Studio as a significant push by Apple towards the low-end side of video editing. He doesn’t mean that Apple took features away or that Final Cut Pro isn’t capable of editing high-end feature films, what Apple did do was to introduce ways of helping the not-so-good be a lot better or sometimes, good-enough. AND, they dropped the price.

The point? A big push by Apple to become the perferred platform for all of the independent, YouTube, Vimeo, film-makers…

Thanks, Norman. My thoughts exactly!

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Changes (again)

In my continuing efforts to learn web programming, simplify things and make a better site, I changed the site (again). This time I switched from a manual, hand-coded implementation to a SQL-based version. The new version uses a database to display the movies, making adding a new movie much easier and more intuitive.

And it was a lot of fun to see if I could do it!

With any luck, there shouldn’t be any obvious differences with my old site. The new site allows me to create a web page for each movie explaining in greater detail all aspects.

More to come!