ATI Avivo vs NVIDIA Purevideo: Spring 2006 April 23, 2006

Introduction

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This is an experiment. You are a participant.

For our first video feature, we've decided to take a look at the current status of ATI AVIVO and NVIDIA PureVideo decoding technology. After all, what better way to explain video technology than with a video?

So what's our experiment? Well, it's common knowledge that most video reviews of graphics cards are boring. Someone will stand in front of a camera and ramble for a bit and when you're done, you really haven't learned anything that you couldn't have gotten from a regular written review.

Our question was: what happens if someone takes the time to make video reviews interesting? What if we try to entertain while we inform? Instead of aiming to be a Motor Week or an America's Test Kitchen, why not try to do something that has the cheekiness of Top Gear, the technical passion of Fifth Gear, and the over-the-top drama of Best Motoring or Iron Chef? And if we did this, would anyone care?

Well, you tell me.

Windows Media Video HD (1280x720p 1.66Mbps)
Right click on the thumbnail to save this video to your PC

Primary Location: http://www.gamedaily.com/download/info/?packageid=0078701179

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If I've done my job, you will have been entertained and been informed. If you hated the video, then there's really no need for you to read on. If you're interested in seeing more videos like this, then read on.

The Economics

Producing videos at this level of quality is substantially more expensive than producing written reviews. At the end of the day, you'd rather have a website stay alive than burn all of its cash doing video reviews. Compounding to the problem is that tracking how many people have watched a video is substantially tougher than tracking the number of page views a written article has received. The vast majority of you will read the articles straight off the FiringSquad.com, but videos get mirrored and transferred among friends.

So, as part of this experiment, I ask that if you send people to the webpage instead of the video directly. Simply put, the only way to fund these video productions is if we can receive a commensurate number of pageviews. (Unless you'd be willing to pay a subscription fee.)

The Logistics

Did you notice that the title referred to "March 2006" even though we're publishing this in late April? This video has been in the works since February or so. Video reviews take more time to produce, and for many products, it's helpful to have our content available in a timely manner. Consider our CES Video or Fatal1ty interview which was released several months after the video footage was taken…

With time, we should be able to decrease our production time, however videos will always take longer to produce than a traditional written review. The screenplay takes as much time to write as the article. Then you have the whole video part to produce. Once you produce the video, any "new information" cannot easily be added to the video. We have to use a text supplement to clarify the details.

In order to maintain high production values, "everything matters." In the written medium, I could just tell you that that NVIDIA's engineers have been hard at work. In a video, I'd have to give you exposition through conflict, humor, or drama. I tried going through B-roll footage, but it just didn't have the right flavor. Coming up with the Metal Gear Solid spoof and actually producing that scene took a substantial amount of time. But all that effort was for a 5 second scene that has no bearing to the actual substance of the video! The problem is, it's that kind of stuff that makes video reviews entertaining.

Technical Decisions

This video was high-definition 720p @ 30Hz. We'll likely switch to a 720p @ 24Hz to decrease the size of the download. Would you have preferred lower-resolution streaming video instead of downloading the video? How were your download speeds? Would you prefer torrent distribution?

In the End

It'll be up to you, the reader, to decide whether FiringSquad does more video reviews or not. There are definitely hurdles that we'll have to address, but we'll do video reviews it if that's what you guys want. As this is our first attempt, it'll take time before we can really get the production values up to the level that we want to reach. Still, we hope that this was the best 10 minutes you've spent at a hardware website. For all the problems associated with video reviews, it's still the best way to understand the purpose of various video quality features and of course, it's fun.

Your support is actually very easy. You vote by making sure this article gets a lot of pageviews. When you spread this video around to your techie friends and show it the Geek Squad guy at Best Buy, make sure they know to come back to this specific page. If you want to help me out, here are a few other questions I'd like to ask.

1. Was the video too short, too long, or just right in length?
   
2. Do you prefer downloading HD videos, downloading iPod-quality videos, or streaming low-resolution video?
   
3. If video reviews came out 1 or 2 weeks after every other site had their written article, would you still care?
   
4. Would you have had a problem if the advertiser for this video was ASUS, ATI, NVIDIA, or SAPPHIRE? What if we had a review of one product where the sponsor was the manufacturer?
   
5. Were there too few, too many, or just the right number of commercials? Did you fast forward through the commercials or watch the credits?
   
6. Best scene?
   
7. Worst scene?
   
8. Did you have trouble with download speeds?
   
9. If you are a BitTorrent user, what client do you use? (Affects "HTTP seeding" options)
   
10. Top Gear or Fifth Gear?