Izzy Video tutorials make it easy to learn video.

On a personal note…

If you follow me on Twitter, then you likely know about this already. But while I was vacationing in the midwest with my family, someone broke into my house and stole my Mac Pro, two displays, and a printer. The police fingerprinted several places in our home, so who knows? Maybe they’ll catch the thief.

Anyway, the story is getting some attention on the local news because there’s a chance the criminals knew we were gone because I twittered about my family’s trip. The media is very interested in Twitter right now.

Of course, the burglary may also be a random crime — which unfortunately is becoming more common in my neighborhood.

Do I plan on quitting my use of Twitter? No.

Will I be more cautious about what I tweet? Yes, certainly.

I’ll update this post with links to news stories as I discover them.

Here’s one from 3TV: http://bit.ly/RlJ67
Here’s the one from ABC14 (embedded above): http://bit.ly/QdLXj
Here’s the one from 12 News.

Previously I showed you how to use a light meter to set a proper exposure for your subject. In this installment of Izzy Video, I demonstrate how to use a light meter to deliberately create contrast ratios on your lighting. This is one of the most fundamental ways of creating specific ‘looks’ in your video, and this episode will make it easy for you.

Also, I added a section that delves into F-Stops, how they work, what they do, and how one relates to another one. If F-Stops have ever been confusing to you, I believe you’ll find this section helpful.

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Photography and videography have a lot in common. Many of the tools that photographers use can be useful for video shooters as well. In this installment of Izzy Video, I review the difference between reflected light meters and incident light meters, and I also demonstrate how to use them.

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Do you like this tutorial and want more? Izzy Video Members get access to the complete collection of Izzy Video Tutorials. Please follow this link for more details on becoming an Izzy Video Member.

Want to automatically receive all the free shows as they’re released?

Subscribe to the free version of Izzy Video in iTunes, and have this episode plus future free episodes delivered to your computer by clicking on the following link:

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For many years, nearly all the videos you’ve seen embedded on my website have been Quicktime videos in file formats such as MP4, MOV, and M4V. I’ve used Quicktime embed code on occasion, but usually I simply link to the video files so you can click on them and watch them in your browser. I did this even when most other websites embedded Flash video files, and clearly Flash was becoming the new standard.

My reason for this has been that I’ve much preferred the quality of Quicktime files over the quality of Flash files. To my eyes, Flash videos were unbearably low quality and difficult to watch. And one of the biggest problems has been the video-sharing services like YouTube. When you upload a video to their service, they control the transcoding process, so you give up your control over quality.

Everything has recently changed. My concerns are gone because Flash now has the ability to play videos encoded with the H.264 codec. This is huge! H.264 gives you the ability to produce high quality videos with a relatively low file size. This codec is the one I use with all of the videos I distribute over the web.

In this week’s installment of Izzy Video, I demonstrate how to create a high quality FLV file (which is a Flash file format that’s excellent for playing on the web). I also demonstrate how to embed it into your website. If you’ve been wanting to embed high quality videos in your website, this episode is a must-see.

Update: I should have mentioned in the video that Don Wigington from www.epikos.net told me about the very useful trick of changing the file extension from MP4 to FLV. Thanks, Don, for the pointer!

This week’s tutorial is available to Izzy Video Members only.

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We’re returning to some video fundamentals with this episode. This tutorial is all about getting a good exposure. Also, I demonstrate how to to use an 18% gray card.

The specific gray card I’m using is from Lastolite. Here is an Amazon link (where I purchased mine): Lastolite 12-Inch Ezybalance Card Gray Card

You can watch the high quality version of the video here.

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