Why do we at Video Labs www.VideoLabs.net often tell our clients that our preferred format for artwork files are vectors created with Adobe Illustrator?

And why are we talking so much about H.264 files for video?

Allow me to digress for a moment.

From a philosophical point of view, the concept of making something out of nothing has long intrigued me, and of course, that has been pondered by greater minds than mine throughout the ages.

I was raised in a fundamentalist religious household where the word “create” was rarely used.  The thinking behind that was that only God could “create,” in other words, make something from nothing.

Well, with due respect to those of the faith, I have wandered away from the flock and headed more toward the Unitarian philosophy of inquisitive agnosticism (There may or may not be a god . . . I’m still thinking about it — fyi, Thomas Jefferson and the great civil rights leader, Whitney Young, were Unitarians) . . .

but to this day, I find to I still have a slight cringe when I am tempted to use the word “create.”

But then there is the graphics software Adobe Illustrator http://tinyurl.com/8nl4y and the Quicktime video codec H.264 http://tinyurl.com/8875c

To my rather pedestrian mind,  (you know the joke, “a salesperson with a little tech knowledge is worse than one with no knowledge . . . ), the appealing features of those two formats are such that they appear to actually ”create something from nothing.”

We’re talking “scalability” here; in other words, the ability to expand and/or manipulate a client’s graphic or video file without affecting the original resolution.

Within the graphics realm, that translates to ”vector graphics.” http://tinyurl.com/y7j84p  In short, what happens is that the lines, colors and other defining characteristics of a graphic are stated in mathematical terms, not rasters http://tinyurl.com/ycplhtt

So when the graphic is expanded, the formula recalculates accordingly — it doesn’t just stretch pixels http://tinyurl.com/y3ar9e

Graphics programs such as Adobe Illustrator (as compared to Adobe Photoshop) handle vector graphics.  So with Illustrator files, our graphics team can better “tweak” submitted artwork files without affecting the resolution of the artwork.

As for H.264, that’s a video format (aka codec http://tinyurl.com/rua78 ) that results in doing a similar thing to video as a vector graphic file does to a graphic.

The most popular use of the H.264 format is within the Quicktime family of compressions.  It has been streamlined by a complicated lot of technical tweaks (read http://tinyurl.com/hbjs3) with the result being able to efficiently transmit large video files without degrading the quality of the original video file.  Think of it as doing to video files what goes on when dehydrating and reconstituting instant potatoes.

To give you a real-life example, we often download a QT H.264 file of a spot from a client’s .ftp site, expand it to lay to tape and add closed-captioning or spoTTracing http://tinyurl.com/6yq8zo, and then re-compress the file as a QT H.264, and upload it back up.  Obviously, a BIG time saver.

Now, full disclosure, there are a lot of variable settings and specs in all of this to make things go smoothly, but we do utilize this process almost every day.  

So, alas, in the end, there is no magic “creation” or supernatural powers in play here.  But as far as my network of contacts, vendors and clients are concerned, (who for the most part are moving a mile a minute like me) – it’s all VERY cool.

Your comments are welcomed below.

If you are looking for media replication (DVDs, CDs videotape) or related multimedia services, please contact me at dryan@VideoLabs.net or 301-217-0000 x104.

If you enjoyed reading this article, then you might also want to check out Leslye PJ Reaves’ article on Flash: http://tinyurl.com/68ahbm

Also check out Video Labs’ blog for more useful tech info: http://tinyurl.com/cnto5o

Follow me on Twitter www.Twitter.com/drmediasolution for exclusive quick-turn deep discounts.

Recuerda que hablo espanol tambien.