Why can I see black bars on my web video?

If you watch some of the clips on youtube.com you will see black bars on either side of the video.

In my opinion it’s not a great look to see these massive black bars on the sides. I prefer to see the video content in full across the whole screen. Unless your trying to go for that epic film look, you will want the black bars going across the top and bottom of the video. Like this:-

So what can we do about? and why is this happening to me?

OK so, in standard video we have 5 common aspect ratios. 4:3, 3:2, 16:9, 1:85:1 and 2.39:1. The TV standard is broadcasted in 4:3 which gives this look in the first video. The other popular standard is 16:9. Which gives a much wider screen and to me it’s much more pleasing on the eye!

The problem arises when a camera shoots footage in 4:3 and then the footage is imported into a 16:9 timeline. A video timeline, allows your video clips to play in a sequence editing application like Final Cut Pro or Premier. Once it’s encoded into a web format like quicktimes .mov or Adobe’s flash you get that lovely black bars look in your video.

To stop it, either film in 16:9 and make sure your timeline is in 16:9 or film 4:3 and again the timeline in 4:3.

I hope this helps!

Signing off.

Realitypod.tv

Transcoding Services

It’s not a new technology by any means, but I was looking for a service that can deliver the Youtube.com type service (transcoding) for one of my clients on their site. By this I mean upload videos, in any format. quicktimes .mov, MPEG4, AVi, flv (flash), windows media, wmv or Real media and transcode them into Adobes flash .ftv format. They wanted a browser based solution so they could see the ingest of videos and managed what files go onto the network for delivery. This works with a CDN or content Delivery Services. I came across a company called Origin Digital. They are calling themselves a video Application Services Provider. It’s fairly well priced and if your a high traffic site, I highly recommend them!

Sorry to get so techie on you guys, but it’s quite an important part of the whole social network aspect of a video publishing websites. It makes your website much more interactive if the user can upload content to your site and then share that video within the networks.

There are quite a few transcoding services on the market, like rip code. Ripcode have produced a serious video introducing the service. I’m actually a little scared of him, Still he talks about the market in great detail and it really helps you to get a good understanding of this growth market. Check it out below.

Have fun!