Pre-Pro: Screening Rough Cuts

How does everyone want to see work-in-progress?

It’s not like the old days where every rough cut was dubbed to a VHS or 3/4″ tape and Fedexed to a bunch of people. Now, compatibility with everyone’s computer and browser has to be considered along with their Internet connection speed to stream a video. And authoring a DVD is not as quick and easy as making a dub. But that’s the way it is.

In what format will rough cuts be screened? DVD, QT, WMV, RealPlayer, FLASH? No one seems to think about this factor until it is about 2:00 a.m. and someone tells you that the client can’t play QuickTime movies on his PC, and you don’t have the codec to make a WMV file. The best thing to do is to make a recommendation first, or ask what everyone would prefer for a screening format, and then to do a test to be sure that what you create actually works. This applies to both DVDs and compressed file formats. It is rare now these days but there are still some old computers that don’t play burned DVDs, only manufactured ones.

If you are uploading a compressed file format for others to stream or download, find the file format(s) that take up the least amount of bandwidth but still meet decent enough quality standards. I prefer h.264 in Quicktime at 650kb/sec, though Flash Video has become almost universally accepted. Flash, however, requires being embedded in an HTML page, so it would require a little web savvy to implement.