Best Practices, Information Technology Services, UNCG

Best Practices

There are a number of guidelines you should follow to ensure a quality final product. Read below for more information.

Good Lighting - More light means better detail. Compression will take away some very fine points. Be sure to over-compensate in darker areas.
Fixed Camera - The more movement the image has, the bigger the file size will be. Unnecessary, erratic movement is harder on the compressor software and can cause problems while streaming.
Close-Ups - The tighter your image is on the subject, the better the stream will appear. The compressor will encode every movement. If the image has only one source of movement, there will be less loss in quality while streaming.

Capture your source material at the highest-quality video and audio settings you can afford. That means you will be using up a great deal of hard drive storage, but it is better to start with a high quality source and scale down the quality than to start with a low quality source and try to get by.
There is nothing worse in any form of computer presentation than text that is illegible and unreadable. Convention holds that if it looks like words, you should be able to read it clearly. Users will tolerate smudgy video far more than they will tolerate text they cannot read.
The balance between background music and narration may initially seem artful, but be sure to think about the viewer at destination. By the time the audio mix has made it through the digital compression called a streaming codec, it might sound muddy and unintelligible. Prepare a soundtrack that works on the worst mono computer speaker you can imagine. If you have narration, your viewers need to hear the narration clearly more than any other audio.

Transferring rich media files across the Internet with limited bandwidths is a powerful technology. Reducing file sizes through data compression is absolutely necessary. It is important to have a good understanding of the technical capabilities your target audience possesses. To smoothly play an audio or video file, it must be compressed below the target bandwidth capacity. For instance, the bandwidth capacity of on-campus connections is about 300 kilobits per second (kbps). Off-campus connections can run between 300 kbps (cable) and 56 kbps (modem).
Unless it is absolutely necessary to do otherwise, selecting a window size at 320x240 pixels and under will result in a reasonably sized viewing area with excellent quality. Quality also depends on the user's connection speed. Someone accessing the media with a 56k modem will need to view the media in a much smaller window so the stream is constant without choppy interruptions or buffering.
During compression, what is taken out can never be fully restored. Hence, the quality of highly compressed media files will never look and sound as good as the original media. When you compress audio and video files for streaming you will always lose some quality. As you make file sizes smaller and smaller to accommodate lower bandwidths, loss of quality is more noticeable. This is especially true for video media. However, current compression software enables us to cut down these obstacles, providing a superior stream.