One of the really exciting aspects of the Internet is its ability to deliver dynamic video & audio content to website visitors. Using a number of popular applications like QuickTime, RealPlayer or Microsoft Media Player, web-surfers can access on-line video on the Internet, and view it on their PC. However, personal computers are not televisions.

The reality is they are subject to the constraints of low-bandwidth download rates. This makes things difficult when you consider that video and audio clips generally mean astronomical file sizes.

That's where City Interactive comes in. We are specialists in the art of compressing video and audio for delivery over the World Wide Web. We use the most powerful, up-to-date technologies and more importantly, have the expertise to produce the best quality, low-bandwidth dynamic media clips you'll find on the Internet.

From videotape, VCD or DVD to website we make the process completely painless!

Capture

We begin by taking your "hard media" which means a video-cassette, audio tape or CD and "capture" the clips you want compressed, in digital format on a computer hard disk. This step is a particularly crucial, because it is important to start off with the best quality possible. Accordingly, we use professional broadcast equipment to do the job and carefully set-up each capture session for optimum results. The resulting file sizes are huge, ranging from many Megabytes to a Gigabyte, or more. That's where the next step comes in.

Compression

To shape those huge capture files down to economical, easily downloadable clips is a real challenge. There are many, many options we have to consider in the compression stage; progressive download or true streaming, frame rate, codec, window size, target user connection speed, the list goes on and on. We consult with you and then skillfully configure all parameters to achieve the best quality results for your media. Then we "render" or "compress" the files on a high-speed computer using the most powerful compression software available.

Delivery

We can provide you with a CD-Rom containing your new web-ready video/audio files. However, we can also harness the web to deliver them if you would like this added service. We can email or FTP them to you, or post the files on our server for download by you at your convenience.


Please contact us to discuss your compressed video and audio needs.