The Human Element

First and foremost, I'd like to make it clear that I'm not a "multimedia expert" as most people have this misconception. However, I do have quite a bit of experience when it comes to video-editing and encoding.

I've just looked at a cartoon encoded in a Southeast-Asian country. The format is wmv, which I'm quite familiar with. The first thing that caught my attention was the large size of the video - a whooping 1GB for a mere 1.5 hr long movie. On closer examination, I discovered that the video bitrate was set at 1.15 mbps cbr and the audio bitrate at 160 kbps cbr.

Any person well-versed in video-encoding would know that the limited colours of cartoons do not warrant such a high bitrate. As for the audio bitrate, 128kbps or even 64kbps would have sufficed. Further to this, as the video was not meant to be streamed, the quality consistency might have been improved by using 2-pass vbr rather than just a one-pass cbr, although that would have taken a longer time to encode the video.

It's not by chance that my videos look so much better and have much smaller file sizes, regardless of the codec I deploy. Take the example of typical $in-gaporeans, who equate experience to the number of years they've been doing the same thing (serious mistakes inclusive) over and over, and knowledge as what they deceive themselves into believing. When "knowledge" is merely what's made up in one's mind and experience nothing more than covering up one's mistakes and inventing "facts" to take cheap shots at others, not only will there be zero improvement, but degeneration will set in quickly, as in the case of $in-gapore.

I'm reminded of the first IAF pilots, who managed to defeat their enemies in the early years of nationhood, despite having only inferior aircraft.

The moral of the story is, you could have the best tools in this world, but without the right human element, these tools won't do any good.