Motor Trend augments their popular print magazine with broadcast-quality Web video, thanks in large part to Apple technology, according to an Apple Hot News article.
“Our one- to two-person team produces video content with a 100 percent pure Final Cut Pro/Apple Solution,” Jay McCarthy, president of 3rd Bird Media Group, and an independent video producer for Motor Trend Online, told Apple. “We edit, compress, author and upload everything ourselves.”
He, along with Motor Trend editors and photographers, travel the world to shoot road tests, auto shows, behind-the-scenes coverage and more. To do this, Motor Trend Online uses Canon DV cameras for filming and Titanium PowerBook G4s and Final Cut Pro for editing and posting.
The new FireStore by FOCUS Enhancements also comes in handy by allowing McCarthy to capture directly to a FireWire drive and cut out the digitizing process.
“I can connect the FireWire drive to my PowerBook and begin editing immediately using Final Cut Pro, a great and very powerful product,” he told Apple. “For video compression, I use Cleaner5 with the Sorenson video codec. If I author interactive video, I use LiveStage Pro. Then I upload to our website, and generally it goes live immediately. So we really don’t sleep.”
He also uses QuickTime exclusively for Web video because of the many advantages it offers for production and delivery, as well as its benefits for end users, he said.
“For the authoring person, QuickTime is a dream because you can stay in one format, from authoring to distribution,” McCarthy added. “This is very important. And you can choose the levels of quality and playback for all sorts of users who get all sorts of features they don’t get with Real or Windows Media Player. For a video I produce today, the next version of QuickTime will be able to play it. You are allowed to compress in so many different codecs, and as a codec improves or as new codecs come out, you’re able to utilize them.”