I've always admired Google. Stripped from all the hip eyecandy, they have always offered pure functionality at a very high level. The quality of Google applications are such that they almost shame similar applications and force them to shape up.
Google changed the way people searched. Google Calendar is a fantastic app with functionality and an ease-of-use that a lot of desktop applications miss. GMail is incredibly useful and Google Docs offer a perfect solution for editing documents online.
And then, there's YouTube. This weekend, spent a few hours learning some extra ropes in Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 and did a special title for a live video of my band. It's an explosion that flashes across the bottom of the screen and then the titles come up from behind the explosion. The video actually has a lot of blue in it because of the lighting on stage. Youtube, using the old Sorenson Spark coded that was used in Flash 7, made my video look like it was composed of lego bricks, rather than single pixels and the title I spent the last few hours on was completely illegible. I experimented with a multitude of quality and codes settings but still ran into the Sorenson Spark conversion. I switched to Vimeo but still wasn't pleased with the quality and especially not with the 500 MB upload limit - especially since I have a pile of HD footage lying around that I'm determined to use someday.
Blip.tv came to me while looking for something completely different. I never really paid much attention to blip.tv since the site says "BETA" and I wouldn't want to waste my time on something that may be history later today. I uploaded my latest effort and lo and behold Blip.tv did an excellent job on the video. In addition, Blip.tv has an excellent player. Blip.tv has my vote!
Still, it's a pity that YouTube, despite being Google, lacks proper encoding and has no HD support.
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Today, I tried to apply a track matte to a video track. I wanted a title bar with an explosion effect.
I had a fuel barrel explosion clip, the shape for my title bar and I had created a matte out of that title bar. For some reason or other, I couldn't get the matte to work. It worked on the main line, but it wouldn't work on the sequence I had created for the explosion.
After a lot of cursing I found the solution. It turns out track mattes are actually tied into your original movieclip. Since I scaled my clip to because the clip was a little too small, it also scaled my matte to 200%.
The solution was to create a sequence out of the explosion, then load that sequence into a second sequence that had the matte. Piece of cake - if you know what to do.
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The BBC signed a technology deal with Adobe last year. It enabled the BBC to make their iPlayer Mac-compatible. Replacing Microsoft's WMV and RealSoftware's proprietary formats by Flash Embedded video doubled the video views.
It's of course impossible to attribute this raise only to the Mac community. It proves that embedded Flash Video actually presents a lower threshold, enabling more viewers to take advantage of the iPlayer.
Recently, the BBC ditched Microsoft altogether and will be replacing their Microsoft-backed desktop applications by applications that are based on the Flash/Flex framework.
It's all the more an interesting development since the Dutch national television recently came under fire when they adopted Microsoft Silverlight technology to stream the European Soccer Championship.
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Today, the Google website presented me with a rather strange help page. It looks like something went wrong with the localisation of this help page. Bad Google!
<p>Als je je agenda openbaar wilt maken, worden al je afspraken weergegeven in de openbare zoekresultaten van Google Agenda en Google. Daarnaast kunnen anderen je agenda en openbare afspraken bekijken met je <a href=" http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=37104">Adres voor agenda</a> of door de agenda toe te voegen aan hun lijst 'Agenda's'.</p>
<p>Als je je agenda openbaar maakt <em>en</em> 'Alleen mijn informatie over beschikbaar/bezet delen (details verbergen)' selecteert, betekent dit dat je agenda-informatie niet wordt weergegeven in de zoekresultaten van Google Agenda of Google Zoeken. Daarnaast kunnen anderen alleen zien of je beschikbaar/bezet bent wanneer ze je agenda openen via het adres of de agenda hebben toegevoegd aan hun lijst 'Agenda's'.</p
See for yourself.
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