I’ve found a few interesting web sites that are taking Internet video in new directions. Podzinger attempts to index the audio of YouTube videos so you can search for a word that has been spoken by a video blogger. This is significant because you can’t really search video content except for the tags that people enter into the form when they upload the video and that often contains popular usernames or spam words that have nothing to do with the video’s topic. Podzinger even gives you the timecode where the word appears in the audio. Needless to say, it is not always accurate. When you play the video you will often find the spoken word was different. This must be similar to the spy technology used to search recorded phone conversations for keywords.
Another interesting development is the ability to insert advertisements in your embedded videos with your own custom logo “watermark”. This technology is being developed by AdBrite InVideo but it is currectly in beta now. It promises to allow you to earn money from your videos, even when they’re embedded into other peoples’ Web sites.
You can buy web application software to run your very own video sharing site but the bandwidth charges and disk storage space required would cost a lot of money. I have found some software that appears to be used by a lot of sites, AlstraSoft Video Share Enterprise. A more reasonable option would be a specialized video sharing hosting company. There is a video portal available from GetYouTube.com which offers a platform for running a video sharing site on their servers. As they note, you would need a string of servers in a cluster to handle the video encoding.
My latest After Effects title animation uses a text animator to make the individual letters in the words fall into place and fade up. It animates the position, opacity, and start parameters. I have skipped ahead to chapter 25 of my book to learn this technique because I like how these text animations are turning out.
