"Great for the Web": Are your eyes painted on?

There’s always a new camera to play with. The DV revolution wasn’t a revolution at all, it was just part of an ongoing process that had supported indie, low-budget (read no-budget) filmmakers with 16 and 8mm prior to digital. From DV we got HDV, then the murky but tasty soup of DSLR’s. Now the inherent flaws of DSLR’s (namely that they aren’t video cameras and don’t behave or handle like one; even though the image quality is awesome) may be giving way to a new bread such as the Sony NEX-VG10. A camera which stuffs the guts of a DSLR (big-arse CMOS sensor) into a much more appropriate video-camera purposed body with interchangeable lenses. This along with counter offers by Panasonic, Canon and JVC continues the tradition of putting a lot of small-format, low-cost guerrilla warfare camera gear into the field. You can nit-pick all you want, cite moire tests, bitrate numbers and rolling shutter gumbo until you’re blue in the face, but none will change the fact that images from these cameras are astoundingly good, vibrant, detailed, sharp and totally acceptable to viewers for all kinds of fiction and non-fiction content. 

And yet I am very often surprised by the perception (spoken or implied) about such cameras in relation to what their acceptance threshold is…

“Great for the Web…” 

Lets explore this phrase a little - a phrase which saids more about the delivery medium than it does about the camera.

“Great for the Web” seems to be a kind of smiling slap. On one hand is praise (‘great’) and on the other I kind of backhanded caveat (‘for the Web’) - with the distinct implication that online is lesser; that the image wouldn’t hold up, be good enough, or acceptable through other delivery mediums, but that online has a higher tolerance. Whether this means viewers are more forgiving of image defects online or whether the online medium itself is more forgiving in the way it displays, is unclear.

I find this all too common sentiment somewhat frustrating. I could make a futurist, forward-thinking, optimistic argument for online media becoming the default media of the future, replacing broadcast towers. Argue that online shouldn’t be a second class citizen to broadcast and theatrical screenings. But I’m less annoyed by that than the technical facts of what online delivery is. The commonality of saying ‘great for online” suggests that too many people still have an antiquated notion of what online video quality is - that they still think of pixelated 4:3, overly compressed, talking heads on YouTube from 5 or 10 years ago.

Here’s the broad technical stuff to set the lay of the land in regard to visual quality of video delivery. 

• Standard Def DVD video has, on average, a bitrate of around 6-7mbps.
• BluRay has a maximum bitrate of 40mbps but movies in BluRay are more often and more likely to be around 25mbps.
• Digital HD TV broadcasts (DVT-B) span a wide range of bitrates from 4-17mbps. 

The EBU (European Broadcast Union) specifications recommend 12mbps minimum based on Mpeg2 compression. Since Mpeg4/H.264 is regarded as nearly twice as efficient as Mpeg2, H.264 at 6mbps in theory should look the same and have the same visual fidelity as Mpeg2 at 12mbps. This isn’t really so in practice thus, to be generous, 8-10mbps is often cited as a benchmark of broadcast HD encoded with H.264. Though 12-16mbps is technically possible and available in some territories, the fact remains that most HD broadcasts are 8mbps or even lower, sometimes down to 4mbps.

This of itself however doesn’t account for the phenomenology of viewing HD video - how it ‘seems’ and ‘appears’ rather than how it ‘is’ or technically might be. Can viewers tell the difference between 8mbps and 14mbps? Frankly many people i know cant tell the difference between SD and HD on their TV’s at home, especially if the TV screen size is under 40”. Similarly people playing a bitorrent rip of a HD film at 5-6mbps are often unable to tell the difference between that and the original Blu-Ray at 25mbps; not unless they sit very close to the screen, staring at freeze-frames and really looking hard for the artefacts. Similarly between 720 and 1080 HD resolutions it can often be hard to tell the difference unless you have a very big screen and are sitting very close to it. Case in point; XBox 360 (720p) next to a PS3 (1080p) on the same screen - the PS3 has more GPU horsepower and many more pixels and it does look ‘better’, but you have to REALLY care enough and look hard to see it.

So, seeing this range of accepted HD quality bitrates (from the bitorrent rip at 4mbps, to the broadcast of 8mbps and the BluRay of 25mbps) how do these compare with online, streaming video? Vimeo, among the first to offer HD streaming, recommends 5mbps for HD but will accept double this (pending file size upload restrictions). BlipTV suggests 7mbps for 1080HD. YouTube’s recommended HD bitrate is 2-3mbps.

Bitrate however doesn’t tell the whole story. It’s here that, in significant part, I blame YouTube for the perception of online being low quality (this despite the fact that YouTube offer not just HD but even 4k) The reason YouTube is to blame is because of its popularity. With such a massive user base, they cant possibly spare the bandwidth and server space in copious unlimited amounts. Subsequently YouTube do a forced re-encode of anything you upload - recompressing it. This means not only a lower bitrate than you uploaded but also compression-on-compression generation loss

So whilst youTube will happily let you upload a 10-15-20mbps clip (so long as you are within their duration restrictions) this will be smashed back down to around 2mbps when youTube’s grinding serves are done with it. The massive popularity of YouTube means that it has become the de-facto benchmark perception for what online video looks like and YouTube most often looks like rubbish because of its forced double compression. 

This is where the other streaming services with less mass popularity but much better practices, are the only way to go for delivering quality video content online. And the fact that i can have my film online hosted with Vimeo or BlipTV in HD at a bitrate 5mbps and above and available in the native specs I originally uploaded untouched, brings us back to the premise of this article. 

“Great for the web…”

Based on the spectrum of bitrates for both traditional media in HD i draw to conclusions: a) that BluRay rocks, looks amazing and is significantly better than any other kind of HD delivery for pure fidelity you can see. b) that BluRay aside, all the others are much of muchness. Vimeo at 5mbps, BlipTV at 7mbps, Broadcast at 8mbps - the human eye really cant tell a whole lot of difference between these on an average size TV screen of between 28” and 42”. Certainly Vimeo and BlipTV’s recommended 5mbps-7mbps is (other things being equal - such as camera source) comparable to so called “Broadcast Quality”, with the difference not in anyway constituting a status as second-class citizen.  

Bottom line is that there is no technical reason why your online video cant or shouldn’t appear to the viewer as possessing anything less than the same fidelity and quality of a HD broadcast. Moreover in time, as we replace copper infrastructure with fibre, there is no reason why online wont be encoded to the same spec as BluRay. 

So myths of innate ‘online-quality’ debunked we should also consider the way in which we view online video. The other reason that smaller format and less expensive cameras may be referred to as “great for the web” stems from the cultural habits around viewing. When we think of on-line viewing we don’t think of feet-up-on-the-couch watching a movie on your plasma screen. That is to say that we traditionally don’t think of dedicated viewing time to singular long-form screen media. We more readily think of short videos watched at work or quick excerpts watched on the fly as we go about doing other things.

This is an assumption of viewing habits - that the TV, broadcasts, BluRay movies are watched in dedicated chunks we devote ourselves to and Web video doesn’t have such demands. This is an assumption that is increasingly false.

I have a Sony Bravia LED TV. This TV has an internet receiver built into it and is connected to a Media centre PC. Subsequently both devices display streaming online media as easily, readily and from the same remote control as traditional broadcast and disc-based media. My viewing devices make no distinctions of hierarchy, importance or viewing habits between what is streamed, broadcast or read with a laser.

When I watch the ABC I most often watch iView - the ABC’s online streaming time-shofted service; or i watch ABC News24 live-streaming. Both these fall under that bullshit nonsense banner of ‘broadcast quality’, yet both are Web-Video. Compressed just as Vimeo or BlipTV are.

What this rant is about is recognising where online video is at right now rather than imposing on it legacy perspectives based on the lowest-common denominator of YouTube. It’s about acknowledging that a quality distinction between Broadcast and Streaming video is a misnomer and a myth. That to express that a particular HD camera is “great for the web” is an utter failure to recognise both the technological and cultural trajectory of screen-media in 2010.

Viewers increasingly don’t separate broadcast from streaming because their technology of viewing and their habits of watching don’t make or enforce such distinctions. 

Your eyes aren’t painted on. Open them up and see whats actually there.  

Hit the HD button and watch in full-screen.