A New Era of Illustratology?

The trailer is done! It's posted on YouTube, and the customer, Pat McDermott, seems to be very satisfied with the results.

Upon uploading this video initially, I was faced with a major disappointment. For some reason, the video appeared blurry and pixellated, until I clicked on the little "HQ" toggle on the lower right side of the movie player frame. I was scrambling to find out what had gone wrong, and apologizing profusely to my customer for delivering a sub-excellent product.

It all made a little more sense after finding this blurb in the YouTube Help forums:

We made improvements to standard quality for video uploads! Unless there is a large difference between standard quality and HQ , the upload will produce standard quality by default (and not HQ as before).

In other words, the bar has been raised and you're going to find it hard to get HQ encoding at present, with the "upgrade" to "standard (normal) quality." It can be done but you may need to search the forum to find out possible ways that could work for you. Most of us are too tired to repeat ourselves on this, and no one I know is convinced they have a foolproof method forrendering that will ALWAYS give you HQ encoding.

In other words, the resolution and quality of my uploaded video was TOO GOOD. So good that YouTube split it up into high-quality and low-quality versions for the benefit of people with slower connection speeds. I will have to keep this in mind for future projects, as I think the whole HQ toggle thing is obnoxious, and frankly, unnecessary. If anything, the HQ display should be the default setting, allowing people to lower the quality if needed for streaming speed, etc.

Regardless, this is a very exciting milestone for me. I have been interested in working with video for many years, and have never really had the opportunity. Now I am dying for my recent purchase of Adobe Master Collection CS4 to arrive so I can do even cooler stuff from here on out.

Ms. McDermott is currently on a rampage (in a good way), posting this link on her site, her Facebook page, and sending it out to a staggering number of colleagues, web loops, discussion groups, and a company called Blazing Trailers that specializes in showcasing exactly this kind of media.

I am proud of my work on this project. If it generates some more work of this nature in the future, even better. I look forward to creating more trailers for Pat when she rolls out the remaining books in her series!