10-4 Episode 1: Working with the Visual Studio 2010 CTP VPC

Thanks, Chris!

So that's 1 for the music... and 4 against. I will see if we can strike a balance. Maybe music during the transitions but not during the times that there's voiceover? We'll see what we can do and try to find a way of pleasing everybody.

You've asked an excellent question about the file sizes. Basically, the way that Channel 9 (and 8, 10, Edge, etc.) accepts videos for upload from guys like me is through a program called MagicFolder that the EvNet team (Sampy, Duncan, Erik, et al.) built and maintain. MagicFolder, until recently, used to require all "Videos" to be encoded using a 2500kbps profile. Unfortunately while that profile worked well for live action footage, it doesn't work very well for screen captures. Hence for screen captures, they allowed you to upload whatever video format you want and tag it as a "Screencast" - but the tradeoff was that it wouldn't be converted into Zune, MP4, MP3, WMA, etc. It wouldn't be converted into those formats because the process they used to produce those formats required a known input - hence the 2500kbps profile.

But a couple of weeks ago, EvNet adopted Expression Encoder for their encoding pipeline which is much more flexible with the file input. Hence I can now get the best of both worlds; I can encode my screencasts using a profile which is really designed to display screencasts in a high-quality but efficient (file size) format, and MagicFolder will still convert the file to the other file formats (Zune, MP4, MP3, WMA, etc.).  It's a really awesome option and I applaud the EvNet guys for enabling this feature!

Now what I suspect is that the files you're seeing which are 500MB to 1GB in range are still encoded at the old 2500kbps setting. One of the great things about Channel 9 is that we allow people from all over the company to produce and upload content. One of the downsides, however, is that not everybody is an expert at choosing the right encoding profile to match their content type and tune that balance of quality vs. file size. I have been doing this for several years now, and every time I shoot a new format it's still a learning curve to get it right. Hopefully over time we can educate more content creators on how to best shoot and encode their content. You can always feel free to post comments on their videos and tell them to buy me lunch, and in return I'll help them up their game.

Thanks for watching, and for commenting!

Brian Keller