Behind the Curtain
If you are like me, you view software wizards are meant for well meaning beginners. We cyber warriors like to mess with things even if we don't entirely know what we are doing. Generally put, the RealProducers wizards do a great job. But if you want to step into the software and tweak, RealProducer obliges.

Choose New Session under the File pulldown menu and select the Don't Use Recording Wizards box. Now you are ready to go "off-road" with the software. You tell RealProducer what your clip is and where to dump it after conversion. From there, you jump directly back to the main window to make your own Target Audience, Audio/Video Format, and File (streaming) Type choices.

Target Preference Power
If you pull down the Options menu in RealProducer Plus, you'll find my most valuable RealProducer Plus feature: Target Audience Settings. Here, you can actually adjust how much bandwidth is used by the various connection settings set in the main window. Want a little more power for your 56k video? Maybe trim the audio down a tad and pump up the video. Or maybe you just want to adjust the overall target bitrate from the designated norms. Or adjust the maximum frame rate. Target Audience Settings are powerful enough to improve your clip (or mess you up really bad). Did you get lost in the settings? No fear. Just click the Restore Defaults button to return things to factory standard.

It may look bland but the RealProducer Statistics window will tell you all about your streaming clip.

Statistics, Statistics, Statistics
Once you have actually encoded a clip, a dialogue box will pop up and tell you that the job is done. But if you notice the Statistics button and click on it, you will be rewarded with a wealth of information about your streaming clip. Such areas as bandwidth used (audio versus video) and playback framerate are covered. If you don't like what you see, simply tweak your settings and re-encode. So with my video clip encoded, it is time to get it posted on the Web.