The official showreel:
Although you’ll find lots more video on my business site, plus a more eclectic collection over on my vimeo page, here’s an assortment of videos to get things going. A smattering of what I’ve been working on lately.
Kaizen in Aberdeenshire:
A summary of the Gartner Winners Circle event:
A short trailer for an Employee Engagement film:
Cranfield School of Management’s Business Leadership Programme:
Even a film about henna:
Over time, this will probably get more organised – a vlog in its own right, but if I waited until everything was perfect, nothing would get done. So until I edit this further, enjoy!
A trial embed using LongTail:
Matt- love your blog and thanks for your last response to my question about encoding. Let me ask you this- to your knowledge does anyone still shoot in Standard Def and is there any reason at all to still be shooting in SD? One of my editors mentioned that it doesn’t matter if you’re shooting for web since you have to take out so much digital info anyway in the conversion… Thanks, Leigh
Well, YouTube HD is better than BBC’s FreeView, so we shouldn’t think of the web as being a ‘poor country-hick cousin’ to broadcast – quite the opposite, in fact.
Very few videographers I know have shot SD in the past twelve months.
All the event video teams I work with (who do stadium events, concerts and so on) are still doing SD at BetaSP quality (not DigiBeta), and that’s all they need and all they’re being paid for.
Shooting for the web should be done in HD, and I would personally recommend 720p for that. YouTube does it, Vimeo does it, it’s the top of the tree for web content, and better than broadcast Standard Def.
PAL can deliver 1024×576 in square pixel, which is the golden size for iPad, but really – not exactly a major market. Google TV deserves to be big – any YouTube content at proper HD. That’s where web video meets broadcast.
Broadcasters need such high quality because of the losses incurred in actually broadcasting a signal. I’ve seen Digibeta reduced to pea soup on the way from a full on 4:2:2 shoot to the little screen stuck to the back of a plane’s economy seat. I’ve seen DV reduced to pea soup by an uncomfortable path to broadcast on the ‘Freeview’ digital broadcast network in the UK. I’ve seen HDV look like digital video embroidery on the BBC’s test transmissions of HD. Broadcasting is bad for pictures.
It makes web delivery look so much better (when done correctly). Can’t wait to see it easily and quickly on my big home screen!
So shoot progressive, shoot 720p (the web HD standard), in my humble opinion. 4:3 is dead for the future, it’s been proven than downsampled HD looks better than SD in all but the most expensive of setups, and clever downsampling can only do good to formats like HDV and AVCHD and lesser lenses found on cheaper cameras.