On April 1st, Videometry announced its web presence as a provider of Motion Backgrounds, a form of video stock footage, with four different volumes to choose from. Volumes one and two are a Digital Mix, volume three is Kaleidoscopes and volume four is Sliders. These Motion Backgrounds were created using After Effects and Final Cut Pro.

For compression, Videometry uses QuickTime with a ratio of 720 by 486 for NTSC and 720 by 576 for PAL using the Photo JPEG codec and 320 by 240 pixel resolution and 15 fps for multimedia using the Sorenson VBR codec. Each CD title contains 25 flattened QuickTime clips that can be used on Macintosh and PC platforms and viewed in any HTML browser. Also, they can be exported to a variety of applications, such as Avid, Media 100, Premiere, After Effects, Final Cut Pro, Director, Power Point, etc.

To get a better idea of how Videometry functions, I spoke with Steve Gianfermo, one of the founders of Videometry. He said: "At Videometry, we offer is broadcast quality video. Our content was originally shot on Beta SP tape, or in the case of the motion backgrounds, those are digitally created, but to begin with, they use a source video file. And then using different software applications, we create the actual end-product."

"We compress the images so that they fit on a CD. I’ll explain a couple of things here because I believe there’s a lot of misinformation in this area. Uncompressed video is 30 MB/sec and it is exactly the same as what you get from tape. That means that on a single CD, you can fit 21 seconds of uncompressed video. Using compression, 15 MB/sec is going to be 2:1 compression, 7-½ MB/sec is going to be 4:1 compression and 3.75 MB/sec is going to be 8:1 compression."

"To fit video on CD, we’re using an 8:1 compression. If you want it uncompressed, we would like to deliver that on tape. That would be in the form of Beta SP, DV, ¾ inch, whatever the client wants, though we prefer to deliver Beta SP because we master to that and we feel it is a good standard to use."