You’ve spent days in scripting, shooting your video, and editing. Your short will be the piece that people will be talking about on the Web for weeks to come. So you encode for streaming and out comes the most amazing…

Does your smeary streaming video make a monkey out of you?

Garbage. You have oozing, not streaming, video. The only people who will love this glop will be your family. And they are just being polite.

What went wrong? One of the first misconceptions about streaming video is that it is just an add-on. By that, I mean that many people think that you can take any video short and just "add-on" streaming at the end of the process.

The Ins and Outs
The reality with streaming video is the reality you would find when producing content for any medium. You get out of it what you put into it. Good video doesn’t just happen. Good video is designed. The choices you make when planning, shooting, and editing your production will have a profound impact on what happens when you try to make it stream.

In this article, I am going to focus on shooting good video. Other than a little introduction to how streaming works, most of this information will focus outside of the computer. Many of these techniques apply to any good video production.

Understanding the Limitations of Streaming
If you are going to shoot good video for streaming, you need to have a rough understanding of what the process is all about.

Streaming is all about compromises. Your raw video content, with all its color, detail, and sound, consumes a pretty good chunk of bandwidth (information space). Take a close look at your television screen. You'll see millions of pixels changing every second: images streaking by. Now imagine you had to turn each pixel into data (information) and keep track of all those changes. When you stream that information, a computer is going to have to do the math to make all that happen. A computer is going to have to take your video signal, break that file into chunks of data (packets), and feed those packets down the Internet pipeline. A computer on the receiving end is going to have to put all that data back together so the user can see it.

Well, that is kind of like trying to land a Boeing 777 in your back yard. If your back yard is the size of mine, the end results are not going to be too pretty. If you stream raw video, there is too much data for limited computer and network systems to handle. There is too much data to shove down that Internet pipeline.