“Yahoo?! Don’t get me started on Yahoo” Whit says with a roll of his eyes.

We’re discussing hosting providers again, and this one’s obviously wronged him in the past. I comment that Yahoo’s page always looks kind of crappy too, and Whit agrees, noting that it’s probably a result of their addiction to adding features. “When you keep adding features like that, you’re likely to become spread too thin” he says, and I concur. We both nod grimly at this major company’s crappiness. On to the next one. 

Having a strong background in print design has served to ease my transition into the so-called “real world,” while it has also presented various hurdles I’ve been learning (and plan to keep on learning) to overcome.

My love of Final Cut runs deep. In school, when there was a choice between focusing on Avid and Final Cut, it was a no-brainer for me. I’m a Mac guy, for one thing, and Final Cut is sooooo Macintosh. It also just felt right, and I found the vast majority of the program to be powerful and intuitive. There was only one stage of the Final Cut process that I found disturbingly complicated: the insane amount of options offered to you when you’re trying to export.

Defining hosting options is something that’s important to do as early on in the production process as possible, should they be relevant for your project. When searching for a provider to host your content, look for someone who offers a variety of easy-to-use services and is eager to become your ally when developing Web projects. Sure, cost-effectiveness is important, but available tech support and a wide array of easy-to-configure utilities and server enhancements go a long way in making your job as a developer much easier.

One of the most common problems I run into as a producer of online video is exporting issues. In a perfect world, clients would ask for (and pay for) all of the formats they would ever need up front on every project. Of course, that’s not the way it usually plays out.  It seems like every other day, I’m converting a QuickTime to an FLV or vice-versa. Compress the heck out of it for quick loading on a website, then export the largest file you can for projection at a stadium. Okay, maybe not a stadium, maybe a board room. But you get the idea.