Sorenson Squeeze Powers “Drilled by BP” Coverage of Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Disaster
• Equipped With Laptop, Camera and Sorenson Squeeze, Fishbuzz.tv Founder Jon Brett and Outdoor Life Reporter Captain Brandon Shuler Are Chronicling the Effects of the BP Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill Disaster
• Sorenson Squeeze Encoding and Compression
San Diego, CA(02 Jun 2010)
Fishbuzz.tv founder Captain Jon Brett describes how Sorenson Squeeze 6 helped him chronicle the impact of the British Petroleum (BP) disaster. Sorenson Squeeze enabled Brett to quickly and easily publish high quality video content to his "Drilled by BP" website (http://drilledbybp.com) that powerfully captured the impact of the oil spill on the environmental ecosystem, local economy, and fishing in the rapidly-expanding affected area on the Gulf of Mexico.
The disaster began April 20, 2010, approximately 40 miles off the coast of Louisiana, when a sea floor explosion apparently caused by an oil well blowout resulted in the largest human-caused oil spill disaster in recorded history, killing 11 workers on the Deepwater Horizon offshore drilling platform and discharging many thousand gallons of crude oil daily into the Gulf.
Shortly after Brett learned of BP oil spill, he and a colleague Captain Brandon Shuler, a journalist who writes for Outdoor Life and Sport Fishing Magazine, ventured to the site and began to create video documentaries illustrating the effects of the spill. Their videos, pictures and written dispatches can be viewed at http://drilledbybp.com.
During his reporting, Brett encountered a snag in getting their stories onto the Drilled by BP website, where their viewers could access them. "High speed Internet is not readily available in this area, so it could take up to four hours to upload our large video files to our site," he said. "It was not only delaying our timely reports-it was also cutting into our production time."
A regular user of the award-winning Sorenson Squeeze video encoding application, Brett did not have Sorenson Squeeze on his laptop when he began his impromptu fieldwork on the Louisiana Gulf Coast. After experiencing a number of painfully slow uploads on the low-bandwidth connections of local coffee shops and hotels, Brett decided to download and install Squeeze 6 to his laptop. Within minutes, he was up and running. Using Sorenson Squeeze 6, Brett was able to encode the videos into smaller files that could be uploaded easily to his site in a fraction of the time it took without Squeeze, while maintaining the highest video quality.
"Without Sorenson Squeeze we simply would have never been able to do this." said Brett. "Squeeze turned our upload time from hours into minutes, so we could quickly get our videos to our viewers and spend our time documenting the toll this disaster is taking on habitat, people's livelihoods and wildlife here-instead of being holed up in a hotel room waiting for video to upload."
Sorenson Squeeze 6 is the latest version of the industry's leading video encoding application, enabling video professionals and organizations to easily capture, encode and deliver the highest-quality video on the Web in the widest number of formats, including H.264, Flash and WebM.
For more information about the work of Jon Brett and Brandon Shuler on the Louisiana Gulf Coast and to view their videos and commentary, visit http://drilledbybp.com/. For more information about Sorenson Squeeze 6, visit www.sorensonmedia.com/products.
About Sorenson Media
Sorenson Media (www.sorensonmedia.com) offers comprehensive, award-winning solutions that empower businesses and video professionals to easily and affordably publish the highest-quality video to the Internet and other media. Included among its products and services are the Sorenson 360 Online Video Platform; Sorenson Squeeze, the gold-standard for video encoding applications; Sorenson Squish and SquishNet, which together create an easy-to-use browser-based video publishing platform for user-generated content; and Sorenson Spark, the industry's most widely used video codec, which enables mobile devices and other consumer products to playback the largest selection of video on the Internet today. Since its inception in 1995, Sorenson Media has been instrumental in bringing Internet video to mainstream applications and is committed to dramatically improving the online video experience for both content creators and consumers.