Sidepodcast

If you were following last Sunday’s live streaming show, or if you’ve watched the replay, you’ll likely be aware that we were suffering from streaming problems.

Despite our best efforts, both the primary live server (hosted by Justin.tv) and the secondary live server (hosted by Ustream.tv) failed us. It’s not the first week we’ve suffered problems either, and it appears that as those two services gain in popularity so their reliability similarly suffers.

A solution would be to run our own streaming server, which is what we’ve spent the best part of the week figuring out.

Because we’re new to all this, it seems like a good plan to give it a road test before Sunday. We were planning to record the green screen for last episode of Inside Track today, and as that was the show that started the live ball rolling, it seems only appropriate that it’s the first show to run on the new equipment.

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A couple of months ago the two of us sat around discussing the possibility of trying some kind of live, interactive talk show that we could then release later as a podcast. The general idea was to involve people more in conversation as it happens, rather than post-recording via comments or email.

During the original discussions we’d earmarked the pre-season 2009 as a pretty good time to start such a project, but as you’re likely aware, things snowballed after we found early tryouts heaps of fun and thus plans were brought forward.

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It’s that time again, live streaming comes to Sidepodcast HQ for the second time.

Now, I should preface this post by saying we’re not going to do an entry every time we are record the video. The idea is to set up a ‘Live’ page and give the streaming TV it’s own space. You can keep your eye on the schedule to see when we’re planning to record.

The reason for this blog post, then, (aside from the fact that we haven’t set up the page yet) is that there are changes afoot.

As a bit of a test, we’re moving from UStream.tv to Justin.tv. Personally, I think UStream is a great site, and I’m already missing it, but Justin.tv offers a lot more options. The kind of thing that the techy one gets excited about. So here’s Sidepodcast how Justin see’s it.

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Something we’ve been planning for a very long time, but that seems to have taken forever to come to fruition is Partner TV.

Essentially, the original idea we had was to provide a low maintenance option for any site wanting to play our videos, along the same lines as the F1 Minute sharing model. However, in this case we wanted to go further and make an explicit link between Sidepodcast TV and the site doing the embedding. To do this we’re pushing the video player to the max, and creating custom graphics that play before and during episodes, in order to show that there’s a relationship between one and the other.

It’s likely that you’ve already seen a working version of this on BlogF1, as Ollie did a fine job of integrating our videos into his homepage a while ago, but we’ve just finished working with Ian from Racing Bulls and the result looks pretty good, so we wanted to include it here:

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We’re going to try something a little bit different today, we’re planning to broadcast live video directly from Sidepodcast HQ.

Every week prior to a Grand Prix, we film Christine’s piece to camera for the video podcast Inside Track. We discussed what goes into that process earlier in the week and seeing as a few people found it interesting we thought we’d show you what actually goes on during recording. Oh yeah, and we decided to do it unedited and raw… we promise to watch our language.

Update: The live stream has now finished. We’ve updated the video player to show the recorded session.

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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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I don’t want anyone to think that I’m obsessed with Formula One television coverage, but when I saw this fantastic demo the other day, the only thing I thought was - Bernie needs to see this:

If you play the video and sit back, all you’ll see is a ride on board a VW Beetle around what I’m assuming is New York City. However, grab your mouse, click on the video and drag for a few seconds and then the thing really comes to life.

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Okay, it was pretty much a given from the moment the BBC announced they’d acquired the rights to broadcast F1 in the UK, that HD was factored into the deal somewhere. But it’s nice to get some form of vague confirmation from the beeb anyhow.

Yesterday, the corporation’s head of HDTV Seetha Kumar posted a blog entry responding to consumer feedback regarding the channel’s recently launched Freesat service. One of the first questions answered was related to F1 and of this Seetha said:

Regarding F1, we hope that this will be available in HD as soon as possible within our new contract, but this depends on demand from other international broadcasters as well as from us.

So by the sounds of it, the BBC at least have the technology side of things ready and following the launch of Freesat, potentially everyone in the UK now has access to a subscription-free HD channel.

Take Your Brain to Another Dimension

On this subject Dominic Wells of The Times recently noted that in addition to any planned HD transmissions, the BBC are also investigating the possibility of showing F1 races in 3D.

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