Eight tips for Web producers
By BroadCasting & Cable Staff -- Broadcasting & Cable, 3/18/2001 7:00:00 PM
With today's limited bandwidth, producing streaming video is like crafting the visual equivalent of a haiku. Michael Silberman, MSNBC's East Coast managing editor, tackled the challenges of new media after 11 years as a producer at CBS News. He offers these suggestions for making the most of the "little screen":
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Shoot people tighter. Even on TV, you don't want a distracting background. 60 Minutes learned that a long time ago. It's even more important on the Web. The more pixels that you have to put down the pipe, the more the image degrades.
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Minimize motion. Action doesn't work well in streaming media, whether it is in the frame or is a pan of some kind. The more motion, the worse the image.
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Use straight cuts, not dissolves. Streaming video doesn't handle dissolves very well because of all the pixels changing. Like motion, that degrades image quality.
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Divide graphics by four: Take whatever you learned about presenting information on a TV screen and cut it to one-fourth of that. Say you have a list of 12 bullet points on TV. Translating it into bigger fonts on the Web brings it down to just three bullet points.
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And do not list credits. This kind of information doesn't belong in a stream. Direct viewers elsewhere on the site for a text version.
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Use the Web-page context. Frame streams in terms of the surrounding Web page, not as a separate piece in a stand-alone video player. If you have an anchor, he or she can point to tabs and buttons on the surrounding page for further information.
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Keep it brief. Sure, you can put a lot of footage up on the Web. But, for now, users have a short attention span for video. If you go much longer than five or, at most, 10 minutes, you've lost most of your audience.
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Keep it fresh. Visitors to news sites want live streams or clips on-demand about breaking stories. The day's hot topics get played. Clips of the Concorde crashing was played many hundreds of thousands of times.
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Maintain high production values. The GIGO rule (garbage in, garbage out) applies when you encode streaming media.
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If the source file is low quality, the streaming version will be low quality. Do not think, "It's for the Web; it doesn't matter." Treat it like broadcast, and you get a much higher-quality end result.
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