As a result of some interim administrative shuffling, the university’s Copyright Office is now a part of the Library Systems Office. That’s why it became my problem when last week our Copyright Officer brought in a MiniDV tape from a recent panel discussion and asked if I could put it up on the web.
“Oh sure,” I said, “Just leave it here and I’ll get to it in the next day or so.” That next day or so was important since I had no real idea of what to do but sensed that I finally had an opportunity (excuse?) to work on something I’d been wanting to do for some time—set up the QTSS (QuickTime Streaming Server) software that comes with Mac OS X Server.
My general plan was simple enough: use iMovie to get the video off the tape and convert it to QuickTime and then use the QTSS package to deliver the content via the web. I checked over my shoulder for any Acacia lawyers that might be lurking, saw none and got to work.
My first discovery was that mini-DV tapes apparently only dump their contents to computer in real-time—it took 45 minutes to move the “movie” from tape to my desktop. But that was fine. During the 45 minutes it took to get the content into iMovie, I read Apple’s online documentation and then activated and configured the QuickTime server. During the final “reel” I even managed to read a few pages in the online iMovie documentation to boot.
iMovie makes this a pretty simple process, particularly if your target is moving the content to a DVD or a QuickTime file. Simple, but as I proved more than once, not idiot-proof. My first revelation was that you have to encode video in a special way if you’re planning to stream it. Apple calls this “hinting” and I’d argue that’s the way they chose to document it as well.
I finally decided on MP4 output…and 30 minutes later, I had a video stream that looked really great but had no sound—an important part of any panel discussion. Turns out there was a tab I didn’t click to set the audio (for some reason it was defaulting to “no audio”).
My final attempt worked. Within iMovie I selected “Expert” share setting, then made these adjustments:
File format: MPEG-4 Improved
Data rate: 192 kbits/sec
Image Size: 320×240 QVGA
Frame Rate: 15
Key Frame: every 24 frames
Under the “Streaming” tab I selected:
Enable streaming, max packet size 1450, packet duration 100ms, optimize for server
That made a nice-looking video but wasn’t great for slow network users…so I also created a “web streaming” version using the iMovie web stream default setting, which ended up with 240×170, 12 fps, .mov file. You can view the larger one here:
and the smaller one here:
Clearly, I still have a bit to learn about editing but it worked. I’m relying on another campus office to provide the same stream in Windows Media format (since they’re well equipped to offer Windows-based services).