Lights Camera Help (Help!)

One of my favorite uStudio customers is Lights Camera Help (LCH), a nonprofit organization that is dedicated to encouraging other nonprofit and cause-driven organizations to use film and video to tell their stories. We are proud to have supported them with pro bono software for the last two years.

LCH uses the uStudio platform as the backbone for their annual film festival, managing among other items, video uploads and judges screening. This year’s festival took place a few weeks ago. Since I am on the LCH Board, I participated in the festival, watching films from across the world over three days at Austin’s famous Alamo Drafthouse.

Since festivals are live events, anything can happen and usually does. This year didn’t disappoint. On the second evening, one of LCH’s discs simply wasn’t working for the projectionist. One of the staff logged into uStudio and handed their laptop over. I wondered what our player and files would look like stretched across a 2k screen. Before I had time to think about alternatives, our player popped up on the big screen for a moment  and the film played seamlessly. I was truly amazed at how well the transcoded files looked on the screen. If I didn’t know a thing or two about compression, I don’t think I would have even noticed a difference.

Our industry has come a long way with digital encoding and I’m happy to report that our HTML5 player and 1080p files fully support large screen projection without doing a thing. 

Lastly, I thought I’d share my favorite winning film. All of the pieces were powerful in their own way, which made choosing winners particularly difficult.