Ten Myths about Video in e-learning (May 10)

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1 Ten Myths about Video in e-learning (May 10) By Stephen Haskin May 3 and 10, 2010 "Video is a true democracy. Anyone can do it. And sometimes it seems like everyone is doing it! But video requires an intelligent approach, and there are plenty of examples of videos (e.g., on YouTube and elsewhere) that were not done intelligently. From concept to script, to shoot, to post production, to delivery, professionals in the e-learning field need to think about what we re doing, why we re doing it, and how we re going to get it done as quickly and as inexpensively as we can." In our world of e-learning, video has become an important element in the mix of all the modalities we use as practitioners of the art of online instruction. But much of the advice and common wisdom about this medium simply gets it wrong. This article took its inspiration from the many sessions I ve attended at conferences over the years and from the many comments that I ve seen in online forums where many things were said that just aren t true. At best, those who provided this misinformation didn t have the correct information, or they lacked experience, or in the worst cases were pushing some strange sales agenda. Shaking up people s beliefs can be dangerous, and it can be ugly. I might shake up some people s strongly held beliefs, but there are some things that need to be said about myths that many in e-learning have come to accept as true. Let me begin by offering a little personal perspective to explain (at least in part) my biases. Some perspective It used to be expensive to make video, but money is no longer an issue. The cost of entry into video when I started was somewhere north of $1,000,000 and was probably more like $2.0 to 2.5 million dollars. I don t even want to think about what it would be in today s dollars. Cameras were huge. Going on location to shoot video meant you needed a truck loaded with cameras, thick cables, and lights (cameras needed either sunlight or very bright lights), and you needed find someplace with lots of power where you could hook up. Today, the cost of entry is a few hundred dollars for camera and software heck, not even that much if you re using a Flip. Macs and PCs come with serviceable editing programs baked into their respective operating systems. The barrier is a great deal lower than it once was. Moreover, video is a true democracy. Anyone can do it. And sometimes it seems like everyone is doing it! But in training, we have to do it intelligently and therein lies the rub. There are lots of videos on YouTube that were not done intelligently. There are scores of television series and specials, and movies (both shorts and features) that are not done intelligently. From concept to script to shoot (or not if you re making video-not-video) to post production to delivery, professionals in the e-learning field need to think about what we re doing, why we re doing it and how we re going to get it done as quickly and as inexpensively as we can. (Editor s note: video-not-video refers to video done with stills and words... moving the stills and the words around.) Here s my bottom line: we all spend too much time making video more difficult than it needs to be. We spend too much time thinking about equipment (especially if you re an equipment nut like me!). We spend too much time fiddling with that equipment, fidgeting with our computers, etc. We spend too much time with the wrong information and defending all the myths that surround the production of quality video. These are the ideas behind this article.

2 Video myths in e-learning Much of the information presented here is from some fresh research and the rest is from the school of hard knocks. And I ve had a lot of knocks making video. Myth: Macs are better than PCs for making video I can hear all the Mac lovers screaming now. So before anyone gets all wound up on the Mac "powdered flavored beverage," I own both. I love my Mac. I love my PC. I ve spent a lot of time over the years to try to prove that my Mac is superior. I can t, and it s not. And here s why, at least from a subjective and somewhat objective standpoint: The Mac uses a processor made by Intel, leverages Apple s flavor of UNIX (a highly modified form of BSD), and lays the Mac OS interface on top. Is UNIX a superior operating system to Windows? That is a different argument. Windows takes a processor made by Intel and lays the operating system directly on it. In general, while I would have said that Windows Vista was an inferior operating system and an unmitigated disaster, Windows 7 is a thoroughly modern OS that simply works. If you looked at my PC (or my Mac for that matter), I ve got a consistently messy desktop, but the rest of my desktop looks like XP or an even earlier version of Windows. I just dumb down the interface to use as little of the system resources as possible and save those resources for video editing and compositing. And I do the same with my Mac: plain background, less fancy menu system, etc. I ve run several benchmarks with Premiere Pro on both platforms and the PC actually wins this contest most of the time with identical processors. When running Final Cut Pro (FCP) on my Mac, it is, sad to say, about 35-40% slower doing renders. After Effects, which has no OS X version or equivalent, is even slower on the Mac. Sigh. I can t win, but for those who work in corporate environments where PCs are mandatory, don t worry. Both are easy to work with, so you won t have any trouble with a PC. For that matter, my Mac has crashed three times in the past year and I ve had zero Blue Screens of Death (BSDs) on my Windows 7 PC, which I couldn t say about Vista. The bottom line here is to use what you ve got. It s not a myth that it takes as much memory as you can afford to make video. My video-making machine is a laptop (really). It has a pretty powerful dual-core processor (I m going to move up soon to a laptop with a quad-core processor), but more importantly, it has 8GB of RAM and two hard drives that have 1TB of storage space and a separate 1GB video card. This laptop is very close to a desktop in terms of capacity and capability, and I can take it with me wherever I go to work. To be sure, it s not as fast as a good desktop at rendering, but it s pretty darn quick. It gets the job done. And yes, it s a PC. Maybe it s not as pretty as a MacBook Pro, but there s no MacBook Pro that can hold two hard drives and that has an esata port for an external drive. And my PC cost at least $1000 less than an equivalent Mac when I bought it (I priced out a Mac too!). Myth: Final Cut Pro is the only good video editing software The short answer here is: Give me a break! All video editing software is about the same. All video editing software offers scene selections, a timeline and some built-in effects. That s pretty much the long and the short of it. To be sure, Final Cut Pro is a terrific program. So is Premiere Pro. So is Vegas Video Professional. And most e-learning projects probably only need the light versions of these programs in any case. Arguing for a program that is overkill for a project is a waste of time and money. The Pro versions all have some elementary compositing, titling, elementary effects, lots of support for different formats (which I will address in the next part of this series), and lots of other goodies. The only real differences are in their interfaces and shortcuts, and even those differences are minor. So don t get your shorts tied in a knot if you can t get Final Cut Pro. The other programs are just as good.

3 Myth: Flash is the best streaming media software / QuickTime is the best media streaming software Flash is everywhere nearly every computer has it installed. That s the upside. QuickTime isn t everywhere. But best is a more complicated matter than a QuickTime vs. Flash comparison. You won t have much trouble showing Flash content on Macs and PCs. But once you get to mobile devices made by Apple, it s a different game for now. For whatever reason, Apple has ordained that Flash will not be shown on their iphone or ipad. This is bad news for Flash creators. Or not. But is the market going to be that big for ipads, iphones, etc? I don t think so. Not in the overall scheme of things. Check out the last myth in this article. So which is the best streamer for video? I think there are other options that are just as robust and that can make files small enough so the streaming bitrate is low enough to get over almost anything except dial-up services (different issue altogether). Let s look at a few of the reasons to use Flash. Why is Flash so ubiquitous? First, Adobe did a great job making it freely available for the masses of PCs and Macs. Second, it s a pretty good streaming (or progressive download see below) container. Remember that when making video for the Web, there are two things that have to be considered (from outside to inside). First, the streaming container. Flash is a container (the file it makes is called a.swf). So is QuickTime (it makes a.mov). So is Silverlight. Second, each of these containers has a file format that s held inside it. For Flash, if you re making your streaming file from Adobe products, it may well be a.flv or an.f4v. Both are flash video files. It could also be an H.264, an MPEG-4, an MPEG-2, a wmv, or an avi, or some other format. H.264 is the one making the most noise these days. But H.264 is primarily designed for HD video. It needs to be inside a QuickTime or Flash file as its own container. Is Flash the best of all the containers in the marketplace? In a word no. However, it s a pretty good platform for making animation, video and other multimedia available to anyone who has a computer. Flash is not just a platform for streaming video. It s an animation platform, it s a programming platform, and it s a whole lot of other things that no other software out there can match. It s true enough that Flash has become more of a programmer s tool over the last few versions. Now there s a product called Flash Catalyst that allows developers to create Flash with interactivity, without having to write code. I think it may be that Adobe finally realized that Flash had lost its early core of followers, the designers, and so they went back to an understanding that coders are frequently engineers and what they make sometimes doesn t look pretty and sometimes it isn t easy to navigate. QuickTime, on the other hand, isn t exactly like Flash. The two are similar, but not alike, in that they are media containers. Flash is designed more for streaming. QuickTime (QT) is also a desktop application. You can save your video as QT, but it s not going to be as easy to put into, say, a Website that you re making with Dreamweaver. One important thing to remember is that whichever codec you use, it s going to compress your video project. All the codecs are lossy, which means there is a loss in quality. If you want to see what happens to any lossy compression format, open a.jpg in Photoshop and save it as a different file. Open that file and save it as a different file. You re going to start to see some artifacts like blockiness in some areas, and the more often the file is compressed, the worse the image will look. The same thing happens in video. And you re going to compress your video at least twice, if not more times. Uncompressed video is very expensive to shoot and edit. The file sizes are enormous and the hardware you need to use is also very expensive.

4 Myth: You need a streaming server to play your videos If you store your video locally, on your own servers, it s probably delivered as a progressive download. While this isn t a problem for most video services that you provide, it does become an issue in high volume instances and a few other circumstances. There are advantages for progressive downloads and there are advantages for streaming. If you look at movie trailers on the Apple site, you re actually watching progressively downloading video. One advantage of a progressive download from your server is that you can make the files in a way that allows them to be saved on the viewer s computer. That s also a disadvantage in many cases. It all depends on what your server s bandwidth and memory are like. Streaming servers aren t free. You can buy the streaming service, you can rent space on someone else s server, or you can buy the software and house it on your server. Obviously, with the outside streaming service there is a hacking opportunity and your video might not be as private as it would be with a server inside your firewall. There are several cases in which a streaming server is more practical (and I m borrowing this from Adobe): A live video broadcast (Webcast or whatever you want to call it) A really long video (over 15 or so minutes) makes streaming more practical A situation in which you want the viewer to be able to jump to a part later in the video A situation in which you want to make it almost impossible (other than using screen capture) for the viewer to save the video on their own computer. A case in which you must eliminate the wait time for low-bandwidth users. The last item might be counterintuitive. Streaming video servers and services, such as YouTube, actually sense your bandwidth and send you a video that has appropriate quality for your bandwidth. Doing that means there are many instances of the same video on the server and if it senses a low bandwidth client, then it sends out a low quality video. The disadvantage is if you need to show high quality video, then streaming may not be for you. Myth: You need to consider portable devices (smartphones, ipads, etc.) when you re making your video Well, of course, you should consider every single device that can play back video. But even with all the fuss being made about it, mlearning really has limited value in the overall scheme of training. JIT (Just- In-Time) training is an obvious choice where you must make allowances for very small screens and people on the move. Small screens, no matter how good, are still small and people have less ability to learn from a small space. While there may be 87 or 88 mobile devices with the ability to deliver readable or viewable content, most of that reading or viewing is done in the in-between times. This is why JIT is perfect for the small screen. Smartphones and tablets (like the iphone and ipad) are becoming very common these days, but are they right for learning when the learning objective takes some quiet time and mind space? The jury is still out on this. These devices are too new. But there s certainly a lot of noise being made now about them. So if you re making JIT training or if you think your training needs to be deployed on a small screen, then by all means make your video in a format for portable devices. More myths coming Are these the most important myths? If they were, you wouldn t be interested in the second article. I tried to balance all the myths, because some are more important than others. Some myths are sacred cows to some people (myths wouldn t be perpetuated if this wasn t the case), and those people can t see past the myths they create in their own minds. If I can offer one more bit of advice, don t become a slave to your own myths about video production. In the end, video production is a job that we all have to do in order to

5 make the bigger picture that is our training, and if we can do it more efficiently, and not bog down our production with myths, wrong ideas and time-wasting concepts, we re better off for it. Now, I m going to explore five more myths, including the one that (it seems to me) may be the most important myth cherished by many in this world of e-learning and training. Video is more complex than audio by an order of magnitude. You not only have sound, but the pictures you place in the video have to be linked to the sound somehow. Then there s the visual processing that takes place along with the sound processing. These are all learnable skills. Even if we re all not like Ingmar Bergman, we can all tell stories. Video just doesn t take a super-talented high degree of skill to pull off. You can do it. Yes you can. Last week, I started off by talking about perhaps the oldest myth, that a Mac is better than a PC. There are other, more recent myths in video production for e-learning that I m going to discuss this week and I ll start off with what is perhaps the most pervasive myth in video for e-learning that I keep hearing. More myths HD is the only way to go Production houses, internal e-learning design departments, and e-learning developers have come to believe that High Definition (HD) video is the only way to make video for e-learning. This myth has been perpetuated since affordable HD video cameras became available starting in about 2004, but it is patently not true. Let me explain why you don t need HD, how it slows your productivity, and how it doesn t make a difference in your end product. What is HD really? There are many flavors. Are you going to work in 720p, 720i, 1080p, 1080i? There are a lot of standards for HD. Is it really better than Standard Definition (SD) video? Is the color better? Is it really sharper? I ll start busting the myth right away. HD video is really no better than SD video, but there s a lot more information (pixels) in HD, so it looks a lot sharper. HD color is no better, and to make matters even more complicated, there is no one color space for HD. Just as there are lots of HD standards, there are several HD color spaces. Without getting too technical as to why, most HD signals are handled incorrectly by computer screens, which is what flat panel TVs are. Color is also perceptual and no two sets look alike. The human eye is pretty tolerant of color variations, and minor variations are common because of the previous two statements. HD video color is not really that different from SD video color. The color spaces are somewhat different, but there s not a particularly greater gamut (the numbers of different colors the video can capture) that gives HD an advantage. And the screens that are typically attached to computers or laptops can t display the entire color space of video or other color spaces, so there s another reason that HD is not better than SD. There s a strongly held belief that, if you start out with a big picture, then turn that big picture into a small picture, the quality is better. But is it? When reducing the size of the video from the native capture size of HD or SD, you are reducing the number of pixels, not reducing the size of the pixels. Since you re cutting pixels out, which pixels get cut? Who decides? Not us. The program we re using to edit or composite the video decides for us. If we go the other way (make the video larger than its native size), the quality of the video is lowered because we re essentially doubling up on pixels, Since we can t decide which pixels will get taken out when we make the picture smaller, it s probably safer to start out with fewer pixels in the first place, since in most cases of developing video for e-learning the video is going to have smaller dimensions anyway. When it comes to e-learning, the heart of the issue of SD vs. HD is editing and delivery. I ll go a little backwards and put delivery first: What s your end product going to be? How are you going to deliver the video part of your training? If it s going to be delivered as Flash or QuickTime or Silverlight via the Web, then at most it will probably be 360 or so pixels wide. Any wider and you could have bandwidth issues. Any smaller, and you ll have issues with visibility. At 360 X 240 pixels you have 86,400 pixels to display.

6 That s a lot less than the 2,073,600 pixels you start with in HD (well, at 1080 anyway). See below for the complete mathematical discussion. Editing Video editing takes a lot of computer horsepower. A lot. Frequently, I ve got Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and After Effects open at the same time. My primary computer has a very fast processor, 8 GB of RAM and a copious amount of hard drive space and I still have to sometimes wait for it to catch up with my editing. This is in SD, which, at 720 X 480, is about 345,600 pixels. If I m working in HD at a resolution of 1920 X 1080 (about 2,073,600 pixels), the story is completely different. This is six times the number of pixels as in SD video. Remember that, when rendering a video, each pixel is handled separately. So each frame takes about six times the amount of time to render. Six times. A three-minute sequence that takes 10 minutes to encode in SD will now take an hour for HD. That s a reason to not do HD right there. We re still about two to three generations of processors and probably software away from the point at which HD will be a truly efficient process. If you re shooting in 1080p, and the final project will be on the Web, you re reducing the image from over two million pixels to 86,400 pixels, about 1 in 20. Does that make sense? Well-exposed, steady SD will make video every bit as good as anything you shoot in HD. Period. Delivery Take a look at different screen resolutions. Here s a Wiki page that defines most of the computer and video resolutions: One caveat, don t get computer resolutions and video resolutions confused. They are two different issues. Yes, computer screens are made of pixels and yes, video screens are made of pixels. But the two are different in both editing and playing back. To steal a title from a recent movie: It s Complicated. But it s not hard. Myth: You can t stream video over an internal network (IT people are you listening?) Here s one that I ve never understood. A gigabit Ethernet network, which most organizations have internally, never ever gets saturated unless there s something wrong with the network. A video with a stream rate of 1 megabit constant (and video isn t constant) would take a thousand simultaneous views to bring down the network segment that is looking at it. In addition, there are some very sophisticated methods to buffer and control network activity. The funny thing is that on a network segment, there s never going to be 1,000 people taking a training simultaneously. And if there were, there s an easy way to control bandwidth, and that s a Web feed that s very similar to a Webinar. Why is the internal intranet able to handle the traffic for video? The math is simple, but convoluted: Let s start with a picture the size of 360 X 240 (that s 86,400 pixels). If the video was uncompressed, then you d be sending that many 8-bit pixels down a pipe times 30 times a second (the approximate frame rate). That math is indeed scary, over 20 million (86,400 X 30 X 8) bits of information every second. That s uncompressed video and nobody tries to push uncompressed video down a network or intranet. Only commercial producers and Hollywood work with uncompressed video. Modern compression methods using H.264, MP4, MP2, FLV, etc. whatever, get the file size down to about 100,000 to 120,000 bits per second. It s going to take a lot of simultaneous streams to put the hurt on a gigabit network. Here s an example: I just finished a video that runs 7 minutes and 30 seconds. The H.264 compressed video is 44,650,000 megabits. Divided by 450 (the number of seconds in the video) that s 99,222 bits per second. Call it 100Kb. That s a rate that any network, wired or wireless, can handle easily with hundreds of simultaneous users. A hundred users would put 10Mb of stress on the network. That s not much, even if the Gigabit network gets maxed out at half that bandwidth. I almost always hook up to the Web via wireless. Even the lower bit rate of wireless can easily handle any normal video you might be trying to

7 watch. That s why you can watch YouTube video on your wireless connection without problems. Video just doesn t take up that much bandwidth. So the next time your IT department tells you that you can t stream video over your intranet, uh, tell them to read this. Myth: Video costs a lot to make Video used to cost a lot to make. Not any longer. There was a time that doing a live (or taped) remote like a sportscast or the county fair (I really did that for several years!) took a lot of equipment and electricity. Big, heavy, expensive cameras, lights, cables, microphones (and there was no such thing as a wireless mic then), sound boards, video switchers, two phase 220 current, a bazillion amps and watts, etc., were the rule of the day. Then if you were shooting something for broadcast later, you needed huge (2 ) tape machines, a big studio switcher with sync generators (a sync generator keeps the video frames from two tapes or cameras aligned with their interlacing), etc., etc., etc. It wasn t easy. Now, you can get a camera that takes a teensy battery, fits in the palm of your hand, a wireless microphone, and whatever light you ve got and you can make a video. Cameras can be had for less than $150. A good microphone you can take on location still costs more, but the sound is great. A little software and you re good to go. It s the democracy of video thing again. The quality is a different story. I m 100% sure that a great videographer and storyteller can make great video from a Flip camera, but the technical quality of the video won t be great. It ll be grainy and have higher contrast and no any subtlety in the mid-tones where most of the visual information is located. All that said, if there s a good story, then it s a good video. And people will watch it. And they ll be able to get something out of it. Our tolerance for video that s not technically great has gone up. Thank you YouTube. Myth: Video takes a high degree of skill to make Video is more complex than audio by an order of magnitude. You not only have sound, but the pictures you place in the video have to be linked to the sound somehow. Then there s the visual processing that takes place along with the sound processing. These are all learnable skills. And we ve been surrounded by it since the 1950 s. We all know what it s supposed to look like. Almost anyone can figure out how to make video in one sense or another. Even if we re all not like Ingmar Bergman, we can all tell stories. Video just doesn t take a super-talented high degree of skill to pull off. You can do it. Yes you can. Myth: You can get away with 15 frames per second There is a very good reason that when film first started to become popular (in the late 1800 s), there had to be a standardized frame rate. Nickelodeons were opening up all over the country to show moving pictures. The reels of film needed to be transported from town to town so they could be viewed using the same equipment. After a lot of experimentation, the movie industry (and this happened worldwide too, unlike the TV industry) settled on 24 frames per second. It was low enough to not use up too much precious film and fast enough to give the impression of motion. The key word is impression because video and film do seem to jerk across the screen when seen at normal speeds. U.S. video has a frame rate of frames per second. European video has a frame rate of 25 frames per second. Film is still 24 frames per second. The human eye (Mark I eyeball to the military) doesn t see in frame rates. We see a continuous stream of photons striking our retinas in patterns our brains put together to make up images. And even though 30 frames per second (fps) is considerably higher than 24 fps, there s still a stuttering feel to action, especially when the camera moves across the scene (called panning) at that frame rate. I can see that stuttering look when I go to the movies. I can see it on TV. A frame rate of 30 fps still shows jerky motion when the scene is changing rapidly. A frame rate of 60 fps seems to be the point where successive black and white frames stop flickering and look grey, although there are individual variations. In TV, 60 fps is a whole lot of bandwidth and our standards were developed because of frequency allocation issues. In that

8 old analog video world, frequency was the rate-limiting factor. In film, it was the capacity of the magazines and the ability of camera manufacturers to make cameras that were reliable with faster shutters. Cameras with high frame rates are difficult to make and break down frequently. The same is true of the projectors that would show the finished product. In digital broadcasting, whether on the Internet, over the air, or whatever, higher frame rates mean higher stream rates. Higher stream rates mean higher bandwidth. In the Internet and intranet world, bandwidth is everything. We all need to pay careful attention to bandwidth vs. frame rate. If you re making any sort of video or video-not-video, you ll want to have a frame rate of 24 fps or greater unless you need to have extra jerkiness in your action (for some reason) or you don t mind some extra jerkiness).it doesn t have to be fast motion, just motion. And if you don t have motion in your video, then you should be making PowerPoint slides. If you re using one of the newer cameras, many shoot at a frame rate called 24p. It s supposed to give a cinematic look. Not to me. Video still has a lower contrast ratio (the difference between the lightest and darkest parts of a video and the number of discernable steps between them. Video is just not as good as film to capture the soft look and extended gray scale of film, which is still closer to life. Someday video will be as good as film, but not yet. Close There you have it - ten myths for video in e-learning. There will be more myths. We work in a technological world and technology doesn t stand still it is continuously developing. One day, we ll be able to make video by recording our brains, I m sure, but we re a long way from that now. Learning Solutions Magazine, 2010 elearning Guild