Will cell phone mania change how you video

Recently at the CES show Motorola announced the Atrix. It looks like a pretty hot phone that I am looking at seriously.

It has a laptop dock, media dock, etc. So it looks like the cell phone will one day replace PC's for most people. The intriguing part to me is the these cell phones seem to be quarter HD (QHD- 960x540). This presents an interesting issue for me if I produce a wedding video or other video content. Pictures are well, but much less of a problem.

Lets say I provide them with a DVD or Blu-Ray and a digital copy. What resolution should the digital copy be? If its 1080 then that takes up a lot of space on the phone. If its QHD, it will save space, but then it will not present well on the HDTV when they connect their phone to it.

So what do you see as the pros and cons to providing a digital copy in QHD?

BTW, recently studies have been done that suggest lower res movies on HDTV being received well (think netflicks). That people are more interested in content than resolution. Although I would bet my photography business on that.

Don't export your stuff to QHD, especially since you're talking about a single product which isn't even on the market yet. You're looking too far into it.

I imagine it will be like the iPhone/pod which only takes a specific video format, but the software (itunes, in this case) can/should be able to take a different format and make an acceptable copy.

This is of course on the user's end, not the producer's.

1280x720 with medium h.264 compression should be safe to export for "mobile devices" for the near future. That should work on the iPad, iPhone, and most smart phones. It will also look good on laptops and youtube. I wouldn't worry too much about trying to export the exact native resolution of any one device unless you are a masochist.

720p h.264.

It will be the standard HQ for a couple years to come until Light Peak or USB3.0 become standard and 32GB-64GB memory cards become as afforable as a 4-8GB one today. Until then larger files are too burdensome for the quality gain.

I edit remotely for most my video jobs and I generally export project updates twice a day for review from client and I export ProRes from FCP since it is fast and I can get back to editing once it's done, then I use 3rd party apps to downsize to 720p and convert to h.264 at a bitrate between 2000-4000kbps to preserve file size w/o major quality loss. I have had clients get ridiculously excited when they realize I sent them a file they can check out on the go from their iPhone.

Fast, small, and HQ.

natums, how short are the movies that you make? in Min.

depending on project, 1min to 10mins. Wide range but that is the norm depending on event type and coverage requirements. Highlight reel or short overall coverage. Filesize would vary depending on the bitrate I used. I would use larger bitrate on shorter videos but I would try to keep it between 30-100mb, bit large for 3G network but would download fast enough on WiFi.