One of the first examples ofQuickTime I recall seeing consisted of a pallid Apple tech muttering an expletive at the camera. Most of us who had gone to the trouble of the download and installation at the time (I think I had a 14.4 baud modem at that point, if not a 9600), were suitably underwhelmed by what we saw. I remember thinking that they were going to have to do a lot better than that to maintain any kind of interest among the professional community. Nevertheless, I was still intrigued by the possibilities and continued to download each new example as it appeared.

Flash forward a couple of years, and after a brief foray as a small business owner, an old friend of mine approached me with a job offer. He owned and operated a small video post-production studio, and wondered if I would care to join him as an editor and effects artist. I remember his excitement at the time -- he sublet space in a building with several other production and post companies, and he was the first one on the block to go nonlinear. I remember sitting down at a brand-new Quadra with a Radius VideoVision Board installed, attached to a several thousand dollar 4 Gig RAID, and marveling at the fact we were actually able to capture 30 FPS at 640 x 480 for up to two minutes at a stretch without dropping frames! That was on a good day, of course, and I think our capture rate was a whopping 1.5 megs per second- wistfully we longed for the day we could break that two meg per second barrier without numerous crashes, restarts, and software re-installs.

Flash forward yet again to the present day, and my, but oh my, how things have changed. I've been in the process of helping to set up a large, in-house encoding facility for an Internet startup, and just in the past four months our projected configurations have changed radically on an almost weekly basis. Gone is the need for an expensive, proprietary video capture/playback card -- we're simply running our analog sources through a Sony analog-to-DV converter, and using the built-in FireWire port on our G4s to capture with. Gone is the need for expensive, high-speed RAIDs; the stock drive that comes with the computer is large and fast enough. It’s no longer necessary to become a walking encyclopedia of Control Panel and Extension conflicts, or run an OS so lean it's little more than a System Folder and capture program. Video capture is now no more than a modest load on today's exponentially faster processors. I'm not predicting the demise of RAIDs and capture cards altogether -- for broadcast and high-resolution applications they are still a necessity -- but for the average Joe (or Jane) looking to capture a moderate quantity of good looking video to his hard drive and do some editing and/or compression, the days of having to fork out the equivalent of a down payment on a house for the privilege are gone. Many reasonably-priced desktop machines roll straight off the line fully equipped to do all this and more. Simply add a third-party software package or two, and you're ready to roll.

All of which brings me somewhat to the title of this article -- particularly in light of that fact that many nowadays (including myself) are producing video that is primarily destined for Web distribution. As mentioned above, the configuration we had initially projected for the encoding project that I'm currently working on long ago bit the dust. With the release of the Apple G4s, and their ability to work at speeds of one gigaflop and beyond, we scratched our initial plan of a dual-platform Mac capture machine/NT render station hybrid, thus simplifying not only networking but administration, software maintenance, and flexibility. As a result of the included FireWire capabilities, and the fine performance of the Sony analog-to-DV converters, we scrapped the idea of third-party capture cards, simplifying the process yet further in terms of driver compatibility and proprietary file formats. Though we will still be employing a number of high-speed RAIDs at a few points in the workflow, the onboard Ultra-DMA drives took away the necessity of buying them (and the subsequent add-in SCSI cards to drive them) for each and every machine. A series of Frontier scripts and Applescripts are rounding out the process, helping to automate the capture and rendering of stills, audio, and video, as well as enabling communication with a number of NT and Sun servers, additionally streamlining things.

Above and beyond the stock configurations, there are a number of add-ons, both hardware and software, that combine to make these machines really shine as streaming video production stations. ICE, long known for its astounding hardware which accelerates virtually all After Effects functions and plug-ins by a factor of up to 50, has in the last year jumped into the compression acceleration business. The results are impressive, to say the least.

Most of you have probably seen the much ballyhooed Star Wars trailer by now, the popularity of which has surpassed any other clip in the history of the internet, with the possible exception of Pam and Tommy Lee's honeymoon video. What impressed people the most about it was its exceptional size, clarity, and high-fidelity sound, all of which was made possible by use of the Sorenson codec, arguably the best codec in existence for the production of web video. One down side of the Sorenson codec to date, however, has been length of time it takes to encode something in that format- sometime back on one of the early G3s, I remember waiting well over two hours for one particular short (a few minutes) clip to render.

With the release of Sorenson Developer version 2.1, however, and a set of specific optimizations developed for the G4, render speed is nearly twice the speed of the previous version. The primary tool we are using for rendering out our projects is Media Cleaner Pro, which is fully scriptable, allows you to render out in virtually every popular streaming video and/or audio format, and supports complex, multi-format batch render queues with drag and drop ease. Media Cleaner Pro was also one of the first packages to announce optimized performance and support for the G4's AltiVec chipset, with further improvements soon to follow. When you combine these software advances with the BlueICE board itself, which offloads most of the rendering overhead to its multiple on-board Philips TriMedia processors (up to eight working simultaneously), what used to be a time intensive task can now be accomplished in a flash: Our current configuration is running just under 43/100ths of a second per frame. Additionally, approaching improvements in the next wave of G4s and the upcoming QuickTime upgrade promise to dramatically speed up certain aspects even further, the upshot being that we may be looking at a real-time encoding solution sooner than many of us realize.