Rethinking Video Production for the Cell Phone

It’s clear that the potential for the widespread adoption of distributing video to cell phones, iPods and other compact portable devices is huge. That’s why everyone wants in on the craze. The amount of video available to these mobile devices, however, is relatively small, though growing all the time, and it’s largely made up of repurposed content originally designed for large, widescreen televisions.

After learning new techniques for framing to fill a 16:9 screen during the past few years, producers and video shooters who want to tap into the mobile space now have to refine their thinking about what works (and what doesn’t) for the small screen.

Despite the naysayers, it’s clear that consumers are willing, and paying, to watch video on their portable devices. Robert Iger, CEO of the Walt Disney Company, said his company sold 125,000 movie downloads worth $1 million in revenue through Apple’s iTunes store during the first week downloads were offered.

20th Century Fox, through its production studio, created a series of one-minute dramas based on its hit show 24, exclusively for the new high-speed wireless services offered by telecos, both in the United States and overseas. CBS and NBC have followed suit.

MTV Networks is using a mix of original and reformatted content from its existing and most popular shows to dive into the mobile video space. Besides creating new programs, MTV, and virtually every other television organization, has found cell phones to be great promotional tools for new and established TV programs. Offering cell phone (and iPod) viewers short, two-minutes clips has proven very successful in driving traffic to the MTV family of shows.

Michael Scogin, senior producer for MTV’s wireless division, says when repurposing content, there’s not much a production studio can do to reformat for the small screen. In MTV’s case, sometimes a new graphic will be inserted, but they typically do not reshoot scenes. Scogin is, however, working with a variety of content producers to develop a list of dos and don’ts when shooting original video destined for portable devices. The network has also begun to develop some guidelines for its own producers to think about because the cell phone video genre is still so new. MTV has already established a mobile staging area at its New York headquarters where content is uploaded in a non-live environment and screened on cell phones, just as consumers would view it. This is important so content producers can see what works and what doesn’t; and, in some cases, it has resulted in some scenes being reshot.

At the top of the list is length, and MTV routinely tells its producers to keep mobile content to between one and five minutes long, with seven minutes, which has been tried for some shows, the absolute maximum. "If we expect consumers to watch and subscribe to new video services, we have to make the content easily digestible or it won’t succeed," says Scogin, adding that even short highlight clips of established series, such as MTV’s Laguna Beach or Cribs, take a bit more time to attract cell phone viewers, even though the shows’ dedicated fans have written to the network clamoring for more.

"It comes down to the content," Scogin says. "That’s why sports is somewhat successful on a cell phone. Half the time you can’t follow the ball, but you know who’s playing and when they score. If it’s content people are not interested in on mainstream TV, they won’t sit through it on their cell phone either."

When shooting something that’s going straight to mobile, Scogin suggests using as few wide shots as possible and tighter framing of the main subjects in a scene. MTV has found success shooting a talking head framed to the left or right of the screen, which avoids having scenes all look the same.

"Does that mean it can only be a talking head?" he asks. "Not necessarily. You can get creative within the limitations of the medium, but a crowd of people at Spring Break just doesn’t work." Scogin also recommends fewer subjects in a scene and keeping fast movement to a minimum. The more movement going on in a particular scene, the harder it is for the small screen viewer to follow. Maybe this is one reason that sports programming on a cell phone has failed to deliver the impact it does on a large HDTV screen. Scogin says shooters targeting the small screen should keep the camera as static as possible. Forget about the ubiquitous Steadicam move around a subject- movement like that is tough for a cell phone viewer to visually track.

Contrast is also key. Sharp contrast between the foreground and background makes the smaller subjects on the screen easier to see, adds Scogin. MTV likes simpler, more monochromatic backgrounds and often uses soft lighting from behind the subject and more lighting up front to achieve this.

"Remember that TV is generally a calming medium, so we’re trying to replicate that for the small screen," Scogin says. "We don’t want to make viewers dizzy or strain their eyes trying to follow a lot of fast moving video."

There’s another reason to avoid fast motion- it requires more processing and bandwidth to encode and transmit, making it less preferable for the cell phone provider as well. A very busy scene means that more buffering within the cell phone is necessary, causing video to run at less than 30 frames per second and scenes to appear jumpy and erratic. The bottom line: If the video isn’t easy to watch, consumers won’t do it.

Traditional on-screen graphics, titles and lower-thirds also need reconsidering on a smaller scale. MTV has been testing a number of different options, all proportionally bigger to the frame than corresponding graphics on TV. Scogin says the main objective is legibility. A lower-third TV graphic, for example, tends to appear on the full lower half of the screen on a cell phone. Full-frame graphics are even being considered (and tested), as long as they don’t stay on screen too long.

Though music is an integral part of MTV’s brand identity, the audio for the networks’cell phone content has to be surprisingly simplistic in order to work well. "A lot of our on-air TV shows have driving audio beds and soundtrack music that is often persistent while main characters are talking," says Scogin. "When we’re producing content for mobile, we try to limit that or take it out completely. Fewer audio sources are always better."

Many people, he added, watch video on their cell phones without headphones and listen to the audio on the single, low-quality speaker built into the phone. Simplified tracks sound much less muddy and crisper under these conditions.

And what about HD? Unfortunately, at this stage of the game, it means little or nothing to mobile video content producers, as, after compression and transmission, the pristine 1080- or 720-line video looks virtually the same as that captured with a 480-line DV camera. "HD is not something we think about in the mobile video world," says Scogin.

Once programs are finalized for distribution at MTV, they are either compressed at the MTV’s New York offices or sent out to an encoding service before going on to the mobile carrier. Some telcos want to do the encoding themselves, in which case MTV delivers content on a Digital Betacam and DV tape, or an uncompressed Windows Media or QuickTime file.

Despite all the compromises in production complexity, MTV’s mobile video efforts are paying off in a big way. Between all of its small screen content, MTV Networks is now serving 2 to 2.5 million unique, on-demand video streams per month. "We’re creating more and more content all the time, with the strategy that what works on a television does not necessarily work for a cell phone," Scogin explains. "It’s a different kind of storytelling and a different kind of audience we’re creating content for. They consume video in a whole new and different way than TV audiences do. We always have to be mindful of that if we want to be successful."

For independent videographers, Scogin says the emergence of mobile video platforms has created a "new avenue for the creative community" and an opportunity for producers and writers to get their content seen by a wider audience. "People can pitch us something that might not be right for television, but will work well on cell phones," says Scogin. "And they can do it for a fraction of the cost." Proposals are now being accepted at MTV as videotape or digital files. "This could lead to a television show or maybe a recurring series on mobile. You never know."

In an age where TV stations now ask viewers to send in their "man-on-the-street" cell phone video as soon as a news story breaks, and movie studios and large media organizations see the cell phone as a potentially lucrative distribution platform, the small-screen communication device has taken on a whole new importance.

That’s why broadcasters, in ever-increasing numbers, are preparing traditional TV newscasts for display on cell phones and why new movie and TV program download services are being launched every few months. Everyone agrees that cell phone cameras will offer better quality and expanded storage with time, making mobile video a force to contend with in the future.

Traditional suppliers of professional video production equipment are also joining the party and now offer systems that help content distributors receive, process and send video captured by the millions of cell phones currently in the market. The upside for TV stations is a strengthened relationship with its audience and a potentially wider reach. Media companies, in turn, can develop new subscription services based on the extensive use of full-motion (30 fps) video.

Chyron has introduced two new products to address the growing mobile video market; both leverage the company’s CAMIO asset management MOS newsroom computer system platform. The first, called WAPSTR, lets content aggregators gather stills and video footage from cell phones and quickly insert them into its production workflow. The second, a MOS2WAP option for CAMIO, lets news content creators produce and deliver high-quality mobile content to cell phone WAP (wireless application protocol) pages from the most popular MOS-enabled newsroom systems (e.g., Avid Technology’s iNews, AP’s ENPS and Dalet’s Open Media system).

MOS2WAP consists of a plug-in that runs on a CAMIO server and communicates with a separate WAP server. Producers use LUCI, Chyron’s MOS ActiveX application, to build stories, select images, preview and then transmit completed stories. Changes to the rundown and breaking news stories are instantly posted to the WAP server and images are automatically scaled and converted to compatible formats for display on cell phones.

Vizrt is now offering a similar feature with its Viz/MPS (multi-platform suite) technology for displaying live graphics on cell phones. This special software allows content distributors to change graphics in real time, and is especially suited to applications like up-to-the-minute election coverage and live sports stats.

One company, based in Madrid, Spain, is helping online citizen journalists connect with broadcasters. Createcna’s 3G Mobile Studio system lets anyone broadcast live cell phone video on the Internet via the 3G network. The system can receive up to six audio and video streams from a mobile phone camera and, in real time, can insert them into a live TV show. The 3G Mobile Studio system saves the clips to an internal hard drive and converts them into an SDI signal to feed a video switcher in real time. These clips coming from the consumer’s handset can also be stored and indexed for later repurposing.

Snell & Wilcox has developed a software-based signal conversion platform called Helios, which provides compression, conversion and signal processing. Like Chyron’s CAMIO platform, an optional module for Helios gives content producers the ability to process content for multiple distribution platforms. Called a Mobile Content Processor, this module wraps a master file with metadata, via MXF. From this, several different versions of that file can be extracted and sent simultaneously.

Snell’s motion estimation and MPEG-4 encoding (in software) technology formats full resolution video at 1.4 Mbps for the small screen. Mobile Content Processor takes a piece of baseband video (30 fps) and converts the frame rate from 30 to 15 fps (64 Kbps) for cell phone display. Using Phase Correlation technology, it also automatically tracks "the area of interest" in the image and reframes the picture to zoom in on it. This is a remarkably effective technology for sports and other busy events shot in widescreen but transposed to the small screen. It also efficiently separates the foreground from the background, using Motion Compensation, to blur the background while highlighting the main subject.

Rhozet Corp.’s automated transcoding system lets companies that use Actimagine’s Mobiclip codec- a proprietary codec managed by Rhozet’s system- to remotely prepare full-length movies for playback on mobile devices. The Mobiclip software-based video codec enables full-motion video playback on low-power devices, such as cell phones and handheld game consoles. Mobiclip is currently used by Sony Pictures Digital to provide full-length feature movies on removable memory cards for cell phones.

The advanced codecs at the heart of each of these options, using both interframe and intraframe processing, mean more and more users can send high quality images at lower bit rates. As a result, a new era of expanding multichannel services for wireless devices is already upon us.

For more information, visit:
www.actimagine.com
www.chyron.com
www.createcna.com
www.mtv.com/mobile
www.rhozet.com
www.snellwilcox.com
www.vizrt.com