For years now I had been running a blog on my website RyanNorthcott.com where I would rant and rave about things going on in my life, what was happening in the world and my opinion on it. That’s all changed now because I took the fateful step and forwarded everything to FuddyTV. So with that, a period of my life has effectively ended. The blogging was fun and while I’ll still be doing it here, I thought it was time to leave that area behind and focus on what my real passion is…Fuddy!
So as I sit here, listening to Axwell’s “I Found U”, I can’t help but feel free. It always seemed as though the blog on my website was this 800lb gorilla that I tried to ignore and really didn’t want anything to do with because it reminded me of a time in Los Angeles where I just kind of floated through life not knowing what on earth to do. Sort of just waiting for that epiphany moment to strike and I would know my path. That wasn’t how it turned out, I had to go out and find it. And find it I did…
Moving back to Calgary, and consequently Dave moving back at the same time was no mere coincidence, and that fateful day where we were throwing the football around, has changed so much. Stability, happiness and a future with someone I couldn’t have ever dreamt up in my wildest dreams. FuddyTV has brought so much happiness, it gives you purpose, a goal, drive and an appreciation for the people who truly support it. We’ve got those people out there who will visit every once and a while and then we’ve got the people who religiously come everyday, even if for a moment, just for a little pick-me-up. That makes you smile and I know we all take pride in knowing that somewhere, right now, someone is having a laugh at our expense.
With RyanNorthcott.com gone essentially, the focus on FuddyTV will be even more amplified. I believe a little do up in Avenue Magazine will show up in April, we’re attending the Comicon and perhaps more. More to the point is the further development of the website. It is robust now, but I’d like it to be even more robust, a place where people can not just come to see a funny video, but do so much more. While I don’t know exactly what the “more” will be, no doubt my saying has always been “I’ll try anything twice”.
*Clink* Here’s to a new, focused FuddyTV!
Cheers,
Ryan for Fuddy
I can’t sleep (and someone out there will know exactly why:) and thought that I would spend a minute talking about some of the different compression settings we use at FuddyTV.com. In our infancy when we first started Fuddy the biggest challenge was getting the videos to be great quality, but also a small file size that wouldn’t kill a computer, take forever to load and not play so choppy. You’ll see that some of the videos are still like that, but I am slowly going back and recompressing them so they don’t play so poorly.
All of the videos are first edited by Dave or Erik and then sent to myself for music and graphics. The difficult part is that they use a Mac and I have a good ol’ PC. This causes a problem, because instead of being able to bring in the original file and edited version, they must compress it to a .mov file before I can touch it. Eventually this will change, but in the meantime that’s what we’ve got to deal with.
So when I get a no-very-compressed .mov file which can sometimes be greater that 1GB, I add the music, graphics and then must conform the video to fit within the specifications our video host Brightcove requires. Basically it goes from a 720×480 to a 480×360 and I encode it to the FLV format which is by far the best format for online video. If we want to upload some of our videos to YouTube we have to encode it to the .mov or .wmv format, but this can be a challenge. YouTube allows you only a maximum of 100MB per video and it compresses that using its own system. Sometimes this is good, sometimes it is bad. Often I find its a bit of a crap shoot, and when I’ve used the settings dictated by YouTube, it comes out pretty crappy (see this one for instance). What’s nice about Adobe Premiere Pro CS3 is that you directly encode to FLV and MOV, but I find it still has some work to do.
Here’s the settings I most frequently use for FLV files:
Choose Adobe Flash
Video Codec On2 VP6
Encode Alpha Channel
Width 480
Height 360
Frame Rate 29.97 fps
Bitrate 600 kbps
Audio:
Stereo
Bitrate 128 kbps
So essentially we went from a 1GB file to a file size of 62.83MB…not bad for a 12 minute video! The quality is still there with minimal loss of clarity and the sound is still crisp enough, and the music is good. Obviously it can be good to play around with different settings, but all in all these ones are pretty good. The rule of thumb is the less compression the better, meaning the less times you compress something, the better it will be. If I took the file and compressed it multiple time, the quality would be shoddy, but when I compress it only once or twice it holds its quality and allows us to have a smaller file size.
So there you go, there’s a little insight into exactly how decent compression is done.
/End geek post…
Cheers,
Ryan for Fuddy
After a long while of not really knowing what to do with the blog, we thought it was time to have it resurrected and much more visible. Thus, the blog is back!
A lot has changed in the Fuddy world since its inception and more noticeably since the last time I wrote a blog entry. One of the biggest changes has been the website, obviously, but we’ve also changed how we do the videos and where we are going to go from here. One of the misconceptions is that we are making nice advertising money…we’re not, LOL. I wish we could say that we were covering costs, but we’re not, FuddyTV truly is the freest online video you’ll find ANYWHERE! In fact, we’re paying for YOU to see it! All joking aside, we’ve never really considered the money to be any part of what we do at FuddyTV. We simply like to make you laugh, or in the case of the “It’s a Semi Wonderful Life”, cry.
We are coming up to the 1st Anniversary of our first shoot and I can’t believe it. I cannot believe that we’ve been doing it this long and still manage to have an amazingly fun time. The greatest reward has been making you laugh, I think Dave, Erik and I can attest to that. I’ve found love from FuddyTV, we’ve been noticed by NBC and we’ve appeared on BTV, how much better can it get than that? It’s been a wild ride and it’s only going to get wilder. Hopefully, if everything works out, Chuck Storm is going to be a lot more noticeable. I don’t want to get ahead of myself and spill the beans, there’s still some things to work out, but if it does it is a pretty nice accomplishment for us.
We’re buying a new camera for FuddyTV too, which is going to make the quality of our videos far superior to what it is now. The camera will be either the Canon HV20 or Canon HV30, and not only can you shoot some amazing looking stuff on it, but it also shoots in HD which is something Erik has been wanting for a while. We have been thinking about offering some of the longer, more labor intensive videos in HD format for people to download for a small fee.
Let me be the first to say welcome back to the blog and I hope to have Dave and Erik write more often than me. Frankly I get a little tired of myself, as I’m sure you do too!
Cheers!
Ryan Northcott
for Fuddy
