West Post Digital Press
Digital Distribution - Prepping content for iPad and iTunes
With the new iPhone4 announced by Apple, the web is all a-Twitter about Facetime. That's Apple catchy name for video telephone conversation made possible via WiFi. It's also possible to shoot video on the new phones and edit it, too. The age of the Jetsons might just have arrived.
Professional editors are either laughing or crying about this development, depending on how they feel about social media, free media and portable "fourth screen" media. (The first screen was movies, the second, television, the third is the computer screen, and the fourth ... that would be phones and the iPad. Will there be a fifth screen? Probably. For now, let's deal with four. )
As Jan Ozer wrote in an excellent tutorial to be found here, "Love it or hate it, if you're a video producer on any platform, someone soon will be asking you to get your (and probably their) content onto the iPad."
To hit hit some of the high points of her article:
There are three ways of transferring video to the iPad - a physical cable, via WiFi or 3G. If you want the best quality for your content, go with using a physical cable because there are no bandwidth restrictions. This would be a great option if you're going to be showing a demo to a client on your iPad in a pitch meeting or if you're planning to upload to iTunes.
How to encode your material? Jan recommends 720p (1280x720) because the iPad screen is 1024x768. "When playing 720p video, the iPad scales it down to 1024x576 and displays black bars on the top and bottom, so any horizontal pixels beyond the 1024 are essentially a waste," she writes. If you really want to geek out on the specs, check out a technical note published by Apple.
No big surprise here, but if your video material has fine detail, you'll want to encode at HD resolution. If your content doesn't have fine resolution, you can get away with 640x360. This has the advantage of being faster-loading on iTunes and takes up less of your end-user's disk space.
To summarize, encoding at 720p is a good idea. If you are planning to play back on an iPad, encode at 1024x576 - though many people are choosing 960x540 and that's ok, too.
Once you've decided on a resolution, what about the rest of the encoding parameters? If using Final Cut Pro, the Compressor utility has some easy presets to get your started. Jan's article also goes into extensive detail about other options. As a general rule, though, when encoding for Apple devices and platforms, the H.264 codec as a "preset" without modifications generally keeps machines and humans happy.
Since this "fourth screen" is so new to everyone, there's an inevitable amount of experimentation that has to happen. So try a few outputs and quality-check them. If you want hard numbers instead of eyeballing things, you might consider checking out a free utility called Mediainfo to check the quality of your output.
Thanks for giving us a read and check back soon for more news and how-tos.
Photo Credit: Josh Liba via Flickr and Creative Commons license.
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