The Short Guide to Creating Mobile Video

Creating a mobile video is actually very easy, especially for those who have created digital video for the Internet or submitted a video to YouTube. If you have not created video for the Internet or mobile playback, we’ll be providing a lot of detailed help in the tutorials that follow this.

Essentially all the rules governing the creations of video for the Internet also govern mobile video production. The focus is on creating a video that compresses really well. The video needs to be small both in terms of the final file size as well as the data rate of the video at any given moment. The smaller the file size, the quicker the video will start playing. The smaller the amount of changes from one frame to the next, the more smoothly and cleanly the video will play after compression.

The video maker needs to take into account:

The video resolution of mobile devices ranges from 176x144 pixels to 640x480 with 320x240 the current “sweet spot” for distribution to the early adopters with high end phones and video iPods.

Higher end video phones have the following characteristics when playing at 320x240 resolution:

- video bit rate of 384 kbs (kilobits per second), 

- 15 fps (frames per second), 

- stereo sound with an audio bit rate of 128 kbs

The video players in mobile devices use a variety of file formats. Cell phone video players use .3gp and .mp4 formats, while iPods and the iPhone use the .m4v formats. The easiest and least expensive way to convert your video into a mobile video format is to buy QuickTime Pro for a modest purchase price (about US $30) and test its different export formats on the different destination devices you plan to support. Professional tools like Adobe Premiere and many of Microsoft’s digital video tools also export to the highly compressed formats required by mobile devices.

The tools you use to create the master video do not need to be specialized. As long as you can assemble an uncompressed AVI or MOV (Apple QuickTime) movie with your chosen tool, you can easily convert to a format required by a mobile device video player. The main thing to keep in mind is to avoid video that has a lot of action scenes in it or zooms.

While the technical aspects of mobile video are not a challenge to those already creating digital video for limited bandwidth play back, the creative constraints of the mobile video medium are harder to come to grips with. You are in the same position as producers at the beginning of the movie industry or the early days of television. It is not yet clear what consumers will embrace and what the business models are going to be. 

Nobody has yet fully exploited the creative possibilities of mobile video. So far, mobile TV has generated the major buzz. That’s because repackaging broadcast content for mobile playback is appealing for purely financial reasons. But consumers have het to turn on Mobile TV, at least in North America, partly because the high cost of playing back television on handheld devices has shocked those few consumers who have dared to experiment with it. Also, content created for big screen television in the living room does not play well on the tiny mobile screens. Consumers are underwhelmed.

The other challenge is contextual. Mobile devices can be played anywhere and at anytime, which means the lighting and sound environments in which the production is played cannot be predicted. Often the environment is hostile to quiet and passive enjoyment of mobile entertainment.

On the other hand, there are unexploited aspects to mobile environments. So far consumers are using mobile devices to show friends video clips that range from video captured earlier on the cell phone (such as a wedding scene they captured live), music videos or favorite bits of canned entertainment. This is in keeping with the use of the cell phone as a personalization device and as an aid to social interaction.

Now that portable video is more than “mobile,” but  connected as well, through Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and carrier networks, it’s a brand new ball game. Independent artists who have launched their stories on the Internet are very interested in connected mobile entertainment, because it raises the possibility of more intimate relationships with their consumers. Imagine getting an SMS message from your favorite video artist announcing the next installment of an ongoing series.

This is a rare moment in the birth of new medium. Creative dimensions are completely undefined and artists are not saddled with a large body of conventional wisdom. It invites exploration and experimentation. That’s exactly what the Pocketcine Mobile Video Contest on Renderosity.com is meant to encourage. Whatever the direction mobile entertainment takes, the contest is an opportunity to explore the creative possibilities of the new medium so that when it does take off, you’ll be ready for it.