Another new video format - H.265

For stock footage and stills of London go to London Photography and Video. 

There are nearly as many video formats in existence as there are spoofs of the Gangham Style video and they make a video editor's life hell. The producer's simple question of "could you just export a file for me to send to the client" is the start of a round of "fifty questions", forty-nine of which the producer doesn't know the answer to and the one he guesses is usually wrong.

There is no point or indeed desire to explain things like codecs, wrappers, bit-rate and dimensions to a producer who wants a 23 minute long video in HD quality but small enough to e-mail. Unless you want them to go and make a cup of tea. So the editor (me) takes an educated guess and produces something that will play on the client's Blackberry.

So when a new format emerges from the ITU that will "ease the pressure on global networks" I am likely to crawl into a dark corner and order more tea. But this one could be a goer since it is the successor to H.264 the (not very snappily named) codec that is now the lifeblood of the internet video world (80% of all video streamed on web is in H.264) and is liked by Apple and Microsoft OS's alike. 

The recently announced, excitingly named Recommendation ITU-T H.265 or ISO/IEC 23008-2 or High Efficiency Video Coding [I think I'll stick to H.265] is twice as efficient as its numerically challenged cousin at crunching numbers which means similar quality files will be half the size. At the moment a 23 minute programme (which is all you get in a 30 minute slot on a commercial station) in H.264 at full HD resolution creates a file that's about 1.4 Gb in size. Download four of those and your 5Gb 4G limit is exceeded and that is going to cost you, but with H.265 you get twice as much for your money.

Now I am very interested in how 4K television develops (don't get me started at dinner parties) and this new codec is designed with 4K and even 8K in mind and will start to make it possible to watch online over a fibre connection. It will take a while to phase the new format in but once it is on my desktop and my client's tablet, it is one less question to ask when exporting a video.

What will we be watching in 10 years?

I was sorting out a load of surplus electronic gear that has not been switched on for over 3 years and among it are three perfectly working TVs that I can no longer use, because the TV signal transmitted in the UK is now digital only and these only have analogue tuners. 

About 90% of the material I edit is now originated in high definition and as every UK broadcaster demands that all new programmes are supplied in 1080i I find it hard to watch anything that is not transmitted in HD any more.

I have now started to produce 4K (4096x2304 pixel) video from time lapses shot on a Canon 5D MKII (which are available through the London Photo and Video time lapse gallery). I have nothing to watch them back on yet but 4K TVs are becoming available and PC monitors have been close to this resolution for a while; I expect Apple retina displays will soon reach this level. With the 4K shooting Red Epic and Scarlet cameras becoming widely available more 4K material will be originated and the demand will increase.

The format is likely to remain 16:9 so my LCD and LED 1920p TVs will still be able to show downsized 4K material so hopefully they won't be redundant to quickly. But I doubt they will last as long as one of the TVs I need to get rid of - a Sony Trinitron bought in Hong Kong over 25 years ago and still giving a great picture. 

Maybe I will just keep hold of this one a little longer. 

The future of Sony - a suggestion

On second February 2012 two very large numbers presented themselves in articles online. The first, on Reuters, was that Sony are predicting that they are expecting to make a $2.9 billion LOSS this financial year, that's four years of continual losses.This is one of the biggest electrical company in the world who invented the Walkman, Trinitron TVs, the Playstation and er Betamax.

But in the last decade they really haven't been beating competitors to market with anything amazing. Blu-ray is a collaboration of companies and they have released nothing to compete with the iPad/Pod/Touch/Mac products. They hope to finally start making profit on their TVs in 2013, but that will partly be by selling off their LCD screen production facilities to Samsung for £600 million - hardly innovative.

It's hard to think of an electronic section Sony do not produce products for; VAIO laptops, stills cameras, broadcast cameras, TVs, mobile phones (just), etc. but I can't think of any product that is the market leader - they are no longer a Brand Leader. They are missing a fantastic opportunity to lead the way in DSLR video technology. They have a pretty good series of DSLR and extensive knowledge of video and broadcast requirements, so why haven't they produced a product like the Canon C300 or Panasonic AF101. Oh, sorry, they have. The Sony NEX-FS100E. Sorry again, but it isn't exactly the piece of equipment every cameraman want to get his hands on - unlike the Canon C300.

So Sony have making products but can't really work out what product everyone really wants. One person who was (and is) rather good at working this out is Mark Zuckerberg who had the other outstanding number on the 2nd February. He is set to earn $28 billion when Facebook is publically offered and I have been debating what a person could actually do with that amount of money. My suggestion would be for him to buy Sony, rename it Sony Inc. and start producing the products that some people pay Apple type premiums for at the moment.

Is there anything that can’t be copyrighted?

On 12th January 2012 a London Court came to the conclusion that one company had breached the copyright of another by using an image of a London Bus in front of the Houses of Parliament. In both images the London bus was in red but all the background elements were in a flat monochrome. But there the similarities end and you can see them both here.

The two photographs were taken at different vantage points, taken at a different time and even the buses are slightly different.According to a lawyer quoted by Amateur Photographer: 'His honour Judge Birss QC decided that a photograph of a red London bus against a black and white background of Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, with a blank sky, was similar enough to another photograph of the same subject matter to infringe copyright.' 

Image from iStockphoto

Ok so what about this image from iStockphoto. It ticks the same boxes as the two in the court case, so should iStockphoto remove it from their catalogue or will I be taken to court if I pay for an extended license and use it on the packaging of my new brand of Red Bus Chocolate Buttons?Debate about what can be patented or copyrighted started in the United States in 1790 when the first patent was issued and in England in 1449 when King Henry VI granted one to John of Utynam.

More recently in the world of TV, in the 1980's Quantel successfully destroyed the company that made a graphic design package called Pastiche that worked in a similar way to the Quantel Paintbox, the then market leader. Quantel proved in court that they had the patent for mixing colours in a palette, just like artists have been doing for thousands of years, and the Pastiche could not use this way of mixing colours. At the time there wasn't a viable alternative and the product died.

Unfortunately common sense rarely applies in case of copyright - I would like to see the "don't be so ridiculous" plea made admissible in court - something that Apple lawyers have made into an art form. So now I need a way of copyrighting every image I take or film without it costing me anything - ideas?

Will Google do an Apple?

Despite posting a lower than expected earning result last week Google still managed to earn$37,900,000,000 in 2011 of which 96% came from advertising . Now Google do a lot more than just offer a search engine, but the question is “why bother?”.

If you make such a huge amount from your core business isn’t it good business sense to jetison the less profitable sides that might be dragging you down. Apple had revenue of $24.67 billion in Q2 last year - yes just one quarter - with Macs and iPhones selling in huge numbers.

But desktops, peripherals and in particular software make up such a small part of the revenue that Apple will generally stop or reduce development in non-core products.

The most obvious example of this is their editing software Final Cut. When it was launched it ripped open the professional editing market and everyone from the BBC down jumped on the bandwagon. Now that wagon is going around picking up the Macs no-one wants because FCP is now FC Pro X (or FuCXed as some call it). It doesn’t sell millions of packages because there aren’t a million editors out here.

So Apple will call it “a revolution in creative editing” but I think it is rotten to the core and will gradually become a way of editing whatever you are watching on your iPad. It makes sense to ditch it - to me and the much smarter people at Cupertino.

So what will Google do when they see that they don’t really need to supply all these great aps that people love but not quite enough to pay greenbacks for? Hopefully they will say “we’re making enough, let’s give something back”, because if I lose Google Calendar my future looks as bleak as that of Final Cut Pro X.