Students at the University of North Carolina and at Fudan University in Shanghai, China, led a Web project to bring the 2007 Special Olympic World Games to the Internet in October, and they used Telestream’s FlipFactory and Flip4Mac video compression products to get them there.
“The Games will certainly be remembered as 10 days that changed the face of Special Olympics forever,” said Peter Wheeler, Special Olympics executive vice president. “They were the days when hundreds of millions of people across China, Asia and the world gained an appreciation and greater understanding of the extraordinary gifts people with intellectual disabilities have to offer the world.... We are grateful to Telestream for making these moments come alive for millions of people around the world via the Internet.”
The project brought together more than 300 U.S. and Chinese university students who worked around the clock for 10 days to capture over 1,500 hours of competition which were processed and edited into more than 7,000 video clips. As encoding continues, organizers expect to compile as many as 10,000 video clips of all the athletes by the end of December.
Chinese students and their United States peers videotaped the Game events and delivered the tapes to Mac labs set up at four universities across Shanghai, where the footage was edited in Apple’s Final Cut Pro. With the help of Telestream’s Flip4Mac Windows Media Components for QuickTime, the Final Cut Pro systems compressed the video for transfer to Fudan University where Telestream’s FlipFactory software, running nonstop on an array of servers, automatically transcoded the files into multiple Web formats and delivered them to the production Web server. The Telestream products enabled the students to easily work in a multiplatform media environment.
Technological support came from a number of high-tech firms, including Apple Computers, Intel, Sony, Telestream, Akamai and 6Rooms.
The clips are available on the official Special Olympics Web site, www.specialolympicslive.org.
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