Don’t try and simply put a traditional TV show on the web
I wrote a long and detailed post on this here. Just remember who your audience is and more specifically when and where they will be watching your show. In many cases a lot of your viewers will be watching at work, so try and keep your shows short and under 5 minutes. This also makes it easier to distribute as you don’t have to worry about YouTube’s 10 minute limit. If you’re a REALLY HUGE provider you can subscribe for a YouTube partner channel to circumvent said limit, but it is not terribly easy to get in to this program. I do happen to have an in, so if your show needs help here, contact me.

Stick with progressive video
A traditional television signal is 480 interlaced lines of resolution. This is fine because that is what the TV sets are designed to display. A typical computer monitor is 768 progressive lines of resolution or HD. Remember this when creating your show! Avoid using SD cameras and specifically interlaced content. Stick with 480p and 720p to avoid interlaced artifacting. 1080i will end up being more like 540p by the time it hits the web, so skip that painful step and only use cameras that support progressive video. By following this simple step you’ll save time, money and frustration in trying to get your show online and looking good! Below is an old video I produced  back in 2007 that explains why this is important:

Video is 80% audio
You can have the best video show in the world, but if your audio is garbage then you have nothing. People will forgive bad video, but they won’t forgive bad audio. Over spend on audio, under spend on video. To be a true video geek you must be an audio geek first and foremost. I can’t stress enough how important not only the speaking audio is, but any music or sound effects used. Audio can completely and totally change a show from something painful to something epic and awesome.

Don’t try and chroma key, you’ll suck at it
Do you know why film uses a blue screen and video uses a green screen? Do you know the difference between 4:4:4 sampling, 4:2:2 sampling and 4:2:0 sampling? Do you know what backspill is? Do you know what a nodal compositor is? If you answered no to any of these questions then you’re not going to get a good chroma key when you try and make your video. A bad key can take away from the video and distract from the information at hand. It is time consuming and unless you can do it right looks like bad community access TV. You’ll be tempted to do a chroma key because you’ll think virtual sets are cool or you want to show off how advanced you are. Avoid the temptation! If you think you have what it takes to do a good chroma key, watch the video below. If you have that gear and can pull it off, go for it.

Time to market matters
Once you have shot, produced and edited your show… Well, you’re about 1/2 way done. The next thing you need to do is compress. The time it takes to compress your video matters as it can be a very, very long process. Personally I use a bunch of programs and devices to make this happen. One of them is a great device by Elgato systems called the Turbo.264 HD. This little USB stick will radically speed up the amount of time it takes to compress your video. The down side is that the video quality is not as high as something like my favorite compression tool Episode Pro. I like Episode because I can really get in to the guts of the CODEC and make it do what I want it to do. Since this is web video we have very little movement and the GOP can be really, really long! Another really great solution is built right in to Final Cut Pro. Compressor and QMaster are on the Final Cut Studio disc. Install QMaster services on as many Mac systems as you can on your local network and distribute the rendering load. Compressor makes some beautiful images if you’re editing right out of Final Cut Pro, but it is painfully slow. One thing I have wanted to try but have not had the time to yet is Episode Pro with a Matrox MXO2 Mini with Max. This should supply accelerated h.264 compression like the Turbo.264 HD but ties to Episode Pro so I would hopefully get the quality Episode Pro normally delivers. Could be a very powerful solution for web video!

Make multiple versions
You have no idea how your viewers are going to consume your content. This is web video, not TV! That means that a consumer can watch your content on an iPod, Zune, Apple TV, Roku, Computer, iTunes, Miro or something completely different. Make sure you make a mobile version, HD version and web version for each video, which means compressing it more than once!

Make your life easy — distribute with blip.tv
Blip.tv is a great way to upload each version of your show and distribute to multiple sources like YouTube, Vimeo, Archive.org, iTunes, Roku and others. After playing around with TubeMogul for a while I finally decided to stick with Blip.tv for our distribution partner. While they certainly have their glitches it is well worth the invested time to have a central place to distribute all my content. Grab a pro account while you’re at it, it is well worth the $$. Biggest down side that I have seen is that they have a 1GB upload limit which makes it hard to do long form content like Spacevidcast Live.

Remember to pimp out Spacevidcast.com
Whatever show you’re producing, remember to mention how awesome Spacevidcast.com is! Well, OK, maybe you don’t have to, but if you got any value from this post I would certainly appreciate a plug. We’re trying to change the world by edutaining it with human space flight, and the more people that get involved the better! My hope is that this post helps you produce better online video, and if it does the best way you can thank me is to plug our show from within your show. I know all of the Spacevidcasters out there would certainly appreciate it!

Of course if you need more information on how to make your new media production work, be it from equipment to production techniques, I am available to hire for consulting too. See the About page for more details.

The verdict
This Week in Space premiered today, and I have to say I was super excited (and a bit nervous as this show does compete with Spacevidcast). I love the work that Miles O’Brien and David Waters do so I had no doubt it would be world class. In my opinion it was a fantastic start, but I think they fell victim to a couple of the ‘do not’ tips listed above. Below is the final video they posted to Vimeo. Based on the tips above, do you think some of those items may have helped a bit, or am I just full of myself? You tell me in the comments! No matter what the case, it is FANTASTIC that other new media outlets are starting to come online to talk about space flight. With traditional media dropping the ball, space advocates can use all the help we can get! Competition aside, this is a badly needed show and I hope we’ll start to see even more great content coming out soon! I also hope that we kill ‘em in the viewer count, but that’s the competitive side in me that I’m not supposed to talk about.