Interview with a Compressionist

Name: Bryce Castillo

Location: Austin, Texas

Title/role: Video/Livestream Producer

Company: Bizarre Magic

URL: http://neshcom.com

How did you get started in video compression or video streaming?

While studying fine-art production in college (2008–2012), I started my first podcast, so the video, audio, and live pieces started to blossom around then. This was around the time when AVCHD camcorders and video DSLRs were making HD production much more viable but still a beast to handle. Concurrently, video streaming was still in its infancy, and it was a Wild West of services, software, and viewers. Working through both of those periods early on really frames the current ease of video production and streaming as a miracle in simplicity.

What role does compression/streaming play in your daily work?

I manage the streaming of about 12 hours of live video a week, plus another 3 hours of on-demand/edited video material, so compression is key. We record our livestreams to WMV—not the most elegant, but it’s saved our butts in the past—and edit those down in Premiere for content and export to various H.264 and MP3 bitrates depending on if it’s a podcast download or a YouTube HD stream. It’s not fancy, but it works and is accessible on consumer consumption devices.

What does your encoding workflow look like?

Our live production is cordoned across three computers (a content computer feeds into a switching computer, which feeds into a streaming computer), so it means our streaming/compression PC can be relatively low end for today’s standards. My computer for postproduction is a quad-core, 4 GHz i7 with 16 GB of RAM. Because accessibility is key, almost all of my non-live work comes in H.264 and MP3 flavors from Adobe Media Encoder. For any graphic elements, I tend to stick to QuickTime Animation for clean transparencies and compatibility with vMix.

What surprises you most about video compression today?

How efficient they’re able to deliver solid video feeds for sure. The fact that I can download an HD offline stream from Netflix in seconds is a testament to how far compression has come—and it’s still got a lot of room to grow as mobile processing keeps climbing.

How has video compression changed in the time you’ve been working with it?

Access to simple compression, which has been a huge boon to the advancement of consumer video streaming. General access to powerful computing means the barrier to entry is lowered, and the understanding of compression is wide-reaching (shallow though it may be). Every young kid who wants to be a vlogger and streamer will start to experiment with compression, not out of necessity but because it feeds directly into their goals.

What’s the one thing you wished you had known about video compression when you were starting out?

To do it at all! My very first video experiments in high school were unimportant labors of love and were certainly not worth the dozens of gigabytes and hours of rendering. Given that they’d never be seen on an HD display—hell, most were burned to video DVDs—the act was doubly futile.

What’s the next big thing we should be watching in the world of video compression?

I think we’ve got another big peak or two we can climb in terms of efficiency as hardware gets more powerful. There’ll be a new format everyone can decide to work with that compresses tight, unpacks easily, livestreams with lower lag, and becomes ubiquitous. There’s too much demand on the creation and consumption sides to accept anything other than “easy.”