Sidepodcast

In the comments recently Trig pointed out Sidepodcast has a habit of making him want more gadgets and gizmos. It reminded me I was supposed to write a behind the scenes post about recent changes to our live setup. This is that post.

Know Your Limitations

Last year, around the time of Silverstone testing and the British Grand Prix, we put in place a rudimentary system that allowed us to follow comments on this site, upload photographs and even stream some live video. In most respects everything worked as planned, but we found ourselves with an excessive amount of equipment to carry, whilst being severely restricted by battery life. Additionally as soon as a website thread hit more than 500 comments, it became nearly impossible to load it over the air.

For 2009 we intend to solve those issues and improve our coverage, without breaking the bank.

Keeping it Real

More by luck than judgement, the real time commenting system that was introduced to help us follow conversations during a live show, actually appears to solve the limitations we experienced connecting via 3G.

Previously it was necessary to load a whole thread’s worth of comments just to catch up on the most recent submitted entries. With the new system however, we’ll be able to quickly access only the latest comments and add to the conversation with the minimum of fuss. The amount of data transferred is relatively small (and we’re working on reducing it further), which means costs should also be lower than before.

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It’s very rare that a new technology appears at exactly the time that you need it to, with exactly the right functionality for a perfectly acceptable price. But that is what happened to us recently when we discovered the iTouchMidi.

Almost.

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At the end of last year we listed some statistics relating to this site, and said we’d take another look in a year’s time. We still plan to do that, but top chap SteveInTheUK has done such a fine job of collating information relating to one of those stats, we just had to give him a plug.

The number in question is the comment count, and at the end of 2007 after pretty much exactly a year of podcasting, that number stood at 1,548 comments. Since then Steve has been keeping track of how the figures have moved as the year has progressed. The results have been entered into a Google spreadsheet, the output of which looks something like this:

If you’re statistically inclined, it’s worth spending some time digging into the data, but the two colours of most interest in the picture above are the Total Comments (in blue) and the Total Comments from Live Sessions (in grey). In essence they show just what an impact live commenting has had on the overall count as well as highlighting just how much discussion the last two races have generated.

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We talked briefly on last weeks show about some minor issues we’ve had recently in regards to our bandwidth costs. If you managed to get to the end of that episode we mentioned a spike in traffic led our hosting company, Media Temple, to warn us we could be looking at a bill for $350+ at the end of the month, and then the traffic spiked yet further.

The Price of Fish

As you can imagine, there’s no way we could afford those kind of costs once, let alone on an ongoing basis. The hosting company includes in their grid-service, one terabyte of bandwidth per month and until now that’s suited us just fine. Anything over that though gets billed at more than two dollars per gigabyte and in July we shifted almost double our allocation.

Media Temple do a sterling job of providing us with solid web hosting, the kind that lets us handle 1,600 comments per thread without blinking, but they never claimed to offer infinite bandwidth.

We’ve obviously been testing out a bunch of alternate solutions and amongst them is Amazon S3, which in truth has been a little unreliable of late, but does offer unlimited bandwidth (although it is expensive). More importantly though, S3 acts as a tracker for torrent files as well as a permanent seeder and this is where things get interesting.

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In part 1 of our behind-the-scenes look at chroma keying, we covered humble beginnings and the nightmare’s encountered therein. In part 2, let’s look at how we solved some of the issues while creating ourselves some brand new ones.

Going Pro

We struggled on with the duvet cover for as long as we could (ironing it actually made a significant difference) but the truth is, it just wasn’t good enough. We made a total of 13 videos before giving in and purchasing a professional green / blue screen.

The new backdrop made its debut on the Italy preview show and the results were instantly impressive. The screen folds away inside a soft bag which means some creases are still apparent, but when opened it remains flat and is very luminous in colour, making post-processing a relative breeze.

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Seeing as there’s a brief lull in the racing action at the moment, we might just be able to squeeze in a quick behind the scenes look at green screen technology. I should declare upfront that this post isn’t remotely related to Formula 1, but a couple of people have expressed an interest in the inner workings of Sidepodcast, so please excuse the self indulgence.

The Early Years

The idea of keying out a single colour from a piece of film has been around since the 1930’s. The principle is simple, pick a solid colour as a backdrop, ensure that it’s not present in the foreground and then replace said colour with other footage during post-production. The techniques for doing this have dramatically improved in the last 70-odd years (while costs have drastically reduced), but the original concept remains the same.

Chroma keying is used in all forms of video production nowadays, the local weather programme is the most commonly seen example, but given its relatively low cost, there’s little reason not to make some use of the technology.

That’s Me in the Spotlight

Although we essentially have no knowledge of television production, when we started making videos it was pretty clear that chroma keying was a great way to turn a very small space into a larger one, and as all we had was a small space, it was worth looking into.

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YouTube announced an update to their stats pages yesterday, and although I’m still quite mad at them, statistics are something I can never resist.

We like a good pie chart here at Sidepodcast and YouTube delivers the goods with their latest update, in fact we also get our hands on some demographics we’ve never had the opportunity to see before – ages and gender.

First up I should say that this data set is slightly flawed, because it relies on viewers not only being logged into das tube, but also that they tell the truth in their profiles too. Additionally, it doesn’t account for viewers logged in as someone else (as so often happens here when I browse using Christine’s profile).

That said, the charts are of a certain amount of use so for the basis of this post I’ve picked stats from last week’s Turkey Preview video. It’s been live for almost 7 days and offers plenty of data to work with (at the time the screenshots were taken 4,478 unique views).

Let’s take a look at the demographic data relating to ages:

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As you may well know, we’ve included chapter selection within our enhanced weekly audio shows since day one, to allow for easy navigation of lengthy episodes. At times this has caused a bit of confusion because it means we’re putting out two versions of every show, one in MP3 format for the majority of listeners and an enhanced version in AAC format for anyone with an iPod or iTunes.

Although this approach does create a bit of extra work, we’ve always figured it to be worth it, in order to benefit from the additional interactivity the enhanced format provides (along with chapters, we also add images and website links). The feeds page details the various options for downloading both versions, as well as how to subscribe to our video podcasts, and it’s these that I’m keen to talk more about today.

It’s possible to add chapter markers to video episodes too, although we couldn’t really see the point when shows rarely stretch beyond the 6 minute mark, especially given that chapter navigation wasn’t particularly user friendly either. That all changed though, with the release of an update in February to Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch (or iTouch as I prefer it) firmware.

We’ve talked about how good the iTouch is for viewing widescreen video podcasts before, but this software update added something unique – a chapter guide:

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In part one we looked into the problems we faced when considering a second season of F1 video podcasting. In part two, we’ll look into some of the things we’re doing to stay fresh and up-to-date.

A Video Forum

On the same day that Renault released their R28 challenger in Paris, Sidepodcast was at the Broadcast Live and VideoForum in London. This forum is the traditional stomping ground for the great and the good of the British television industry… and Keith Chegwin (don’t ask).

You might think we’d be a little out of place in such company, but the thing is, we don’t do “video clips” and we have no interest in simply being a conduit for whatever video press release an F1 team decides to push out this week. We want to create brand new and original Formula 1 content, so although nothing we create goes anywhere near a television station, we’re sort of making TV.

It turns out that our trip wasn’t at all in vain, and the forum turned over a wealth of ideas that gave us a whole new viewpoint on the possibilities of video creativity. Aside from the millions of pounds worth of television equipment stacked high inside Earls Court 2, there were a whole bunch of fantastically invaluable seminars to sit in on. Also, Sequence Post Production were in attendance – F1 fans may recognise the name as the company behind Martin Brundle’s brilliant F1 Insight series – and they were an amazingly helpful bunch of people.

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Now that we’re getting into the swing of the 2008 season, and seeing as we’re coming up to the anniversary of our very first Formula 1 preview video, I thought it might be worth taking stock of what we’re doing in terms of visual content this year.

Because the subject is a bit long winded, I’ve split this behind-the-scenes post into two parts. You can view part two here.

Previewing History

As you may know, we sort of fell into video podcasting by accident, and only planned on creating a couple of shows a year, filming footage at various events we attended. This idea was based on the fact that we knew Formula One Management had notoriously strict rulings on who could use racing footage, and back then none of those restrictions covered online viewing.

Our plans changed however, when almost exactly a year ago we were watching a motorsports program on television, and the presenter took us on a 3D virtual tour of the Bahrain circuit. They didn’t do a particularly great job of the narration and we thought we could do better, so after sourcing the 3D animation and figuring out how on earth Blue Screen technology works, we made the Bahrain preview video.

Looking back, it feels like a lifetime ago.

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