Service Announcement for National Day and Mid-Autumn Festival Holiday 2017

Greetings! The whole week long National Day holiday is coming close, and this year the holiday gets a little special — Mid-Autumn Festival lies within the holiday. In other words, the National Day holiday this year gets a little longer than in previous years.

So, in order to get you understood for our service during the holiday and arranged your work better, we would like to annouce it in detail as following —

1. Our office will be available on September 30th (Saturday) as usual time, then closed from October 1st (Sunday) through October 8th(Sunday), and will be back into service on October 9th (Monday).

2. Invoice and document delivery will NOT be available during the holiday.

3. Online support and customer service will still be available during the holiday. If you have any issues on our service and need help, you can contact us via e-mail (service@polyv.net), our hotline (+86 400-158-8816) or Business QQ (800009268) for one-on-one aid, or look up our development documents and FAQs in our Developer Center in case the answer is there.

We apologize for any inconvenience during the holiday. Once again, thank you for your patience, and wish you good days during the holiday.

Cordially from POLYV Support & Customer Service Team.

[POLYV Insight] Let’s talk about film review aggregation websites

Nowadays, if we want to watch a new film in the cinema, we would check the review of the film first – like IMDB, Rotten Tomatoes, MetaCritic, or Chinese sites like Douban Movies (豆瓣电影) and Dushe Movies (毒舌电影). They act like the “testing probe” of the movies, telling us if the movie is worth watching.

While many audience search the reviews in these sites, the Hollywood industry – from filmakers to investors – recently condamned Rotten Tomatoes for “ruining their business”. (Source in Chinese)

From the first weekend of May, to the Labor’s Day in the U.S. on September 4, the gross box office in North America during the period dropped 15% compared to the same time last year, a great decline that the industry never has over the last 20 years.

The Hollywood industry is not the only one that got pissed off. Recently, some of the directors from the National Day blockbuster movies, condamned their work got rated poorly with “1 star” way before they are out for public. (Source in Chinese)

Now, are the film review aggregation websites the culprit to the downfall of the box office, or the poison to the film’s box office?

First of all, the reviews on the film review aggregation websites are not just for professional film critics. Everyone who have watched the film can rate and write a review on it. When the rating count gets large enough, the overall rating and review is reliable and basically revealed the judging and thoughts of most audience.

This mechanism works fine and fair for almost every film of every genre. However, there are some KOL critics violate the rules, leaving bad reviews on purpose before the film release, and ask the directors or investors of the film for money to remove the bad reviews. For these malpractice, the operation group of these websites should be checked often, and take out these bad reviews to prevent them from misleading the audience.

But there’s another type of malpractice that make the audience more dissatisfied – the crew or the investors of the film release fake reviews along with ads or other pomotions before the film release to disguise the film as a good one, while it is actually a poor-made, nonsense BS. This means by the time the audience discover the film’s poor quality, the investors have gained a lot of income.

In the case of National Day blockbuster movies, two of the three directors are actually making false accusations of Douban Movies for “ruining the reputation of the film and the crew”. But, is it actually the story?

If you watch the trailer of these movies, you will find the scenes, the costumes, the plot, the music and everything else is rubbish, and never keep your eye a second more on them. Obviously, these accusations just reveal how bad the movies are.

What’s more, the early stage rating doesn’t mean everything. A lot of films that are not well rated at the beginning, eventually get good reviews and reputations, like Mr. Donkey (驴得水), Duckweed (乘风破浪) and Da Hu Fa (大护法), they get a rating of 7/10 or more, even there are a lot of “1 star” ratings before they are released.

We always emphasize, “Content is always the core”. Without the great content, the work is just a white elephant and not worth a second taste. This is not just for movies, but also for other videos, music, literature and other forms of art. The rating in these film review aggregation websites doesn’t mean everything, but it also reveals how the public speaks to the film industry.

[POLYV Insight] When video meets 5G communication

We are in the age of 4G LTE communication. Compared to 3G, 4G network is significantly faster, with higher bandwidth capacity, and the network quality is much better.

While we still benefit from the ever evolving 4G LTE network, 5G – the next generation standard of communication, is already in progress.

You may ask, what is 5G communication? How does 5G change video technology and application? These are the topics we discuss in today’s article.

I. What is 5G?

5 ^th generation mobile networks, a.k.a. 5G, are the proposed next telecommunications standards beyond the current 4G standards.

In the definition made by Next Generation Mobile Networks Alliance, a 5G network should meet the following criteria:

• Data rates of tens of Mbps for tens of thousands of users
• Data rates of 100 Mbps for metropolitan areas
• 1 Gbps simultaneously to many workers on the same office floor
• Several hundreds of thousands of simultaneous connections for wireless sensors
• Spectral efficiency significantly enhanced compared to 4G
• Coverage improved
• Signaling efficiency enhanced
• Latency reduced significantly compared to LTE

All in all, 5G network has significantly higher speed and network capacity, better coverage and signaling, with much lower latency.

II. How 5G changes the game of video applications

You may ask, how fast is 5G? Well, let’s take videos as example –

If you connect your device to the 5G network, you can watch YouTube videos in 1080/60p without any lags or long bufferings; and if the network continues evolving, it is very likely that you can even watch 4K/60p smoothly without lagging.

Besides general videos, new video experience, like 360 panorama, VR and AR, can also benefit from 5G.

They all need fast graphic processing as well as high network bandwidth. For current computers and mobile devices, graphic processing is not a big problem, but the network bandwidth of 4G is still far from enough for smooth, real-time immersive experience.

With the deployment of 5G network, the bandwidth is no longer a problem –the network capacity is big enough that everyone in a 100 m ² office can watch VR movies at 4K/60p simultaneously without any lags, or play Pokémon Go with significantly better details. That means everyone can have better VR/AR experience, making these video technology gets commercial use even sooner.

Besides, live streaming will take great advantage of 5G communication. As we know, the live streaming technology we use are usually based on HTTPS-FLV, RTMP, RTSP or HLS, which has seconds of latency. And even though YouTube now reduces the latency of live streaming to less than 3 seconds, it’s not very close to what we know as “instant streaming”. With the new 5G network, it is able to develop a new protocol for live streaming that deliver high quality live streaming while it is compatible to the protocols we currently use.

Additionally, some applications of live streaming, such as remote clinical diagnosis, psychiatric treatment and bespoke scanning, will be benefited from 5G as well, as they require very high bandwidth to high-definition video transmission or massive imagery data in a very short period of time, which is not likely to be done in current 4G network.

III. Conclusion

5G network is currently under development, with ongoing some lab tests led by Qualcomm, Huawei and Samsung. We expect to see the new generation of 5G standards being introduced as early as second half of 2018, and the 5G network to be deployed in 2020.

We can also that the technologies of videos are still evolving for the better during the time. With all these factors, the near future of video application is bright and will change dramatically from what we have now.

[Concise Tutorial] 5 Tips for your video voiceover

Howdy! As we provide different tips and tricks for making your product video well, some audience have sent message to us for help of doing voiceover. So in today’s Concise Tutorial, we have 5 tips to make your voiceover work easy and nicely done. Let’s begin!

1. Start recording before beginning the shoot

Many people may think that if you want to do voiceover, you hit the record button as soon as you start. While it’s quite intuitive, in fact you will lost the first few words if you do so, as our body reacts less than a second later in general. But this little delay will greatly affect the recording, making you stop and do it again.

A better way do the recording is to start recording your voice about 2~3 seconds before you actually start. This will help you start more confortable, as well as the de-noising process mentioned later.

2. Keep your voice in the right style

Well, this needs some skills because most of us are not professional in voicing.

Before you start the voiceover, you need to understand the type and the plot of the video, and what kind of emotion is involved in it.

After you have a thorough look into the video, you can divide the script to different parts if you need to, to keep your voicing style the same in the particular section, and the emotion goes well throughout the whole video.

3. Don’t panic if there’s minor difference from the script

Even the seasoned voice actors can make mistakes in the voicing process, let alone us. But that doesn’t mean you should avoid the mistake all the time.

Sometimes you may notice that some of the words you say don’t match the script, and you will hesitate or immediately stop to request another take to do it well. That will take more time to finish the voiceover.

In fact, if the minor difference doesn’t change the meaning of the original script, or affect the understanding of the plot, just keep going without hesitation – the script just acts like a reference to keep the plot going in a right direction, and doesn’t need to be 100% followed if not specific.

If you do make major mistakes in one of the sections, you can immediately stop, then try to read the whole sentence or section a few more times to make it more fluent, or to understand where you should stress or how fast you should voice it. You literally learn from the mistakes in this process.

4. Remove the noise in the background

OK, now that you have all the tracks voiced, it’s time to do some preparation before inserting the voicing tracks into the video. De-noising, or removing the noise in the background is one of the most important step.

It’s ideal place to do the voiceover is the recording studio where it has better soundproof and equipment that bring less background noises, making the voicing tracks clear and sounds professional. But most of us are unable to do it in the studio, and usually in a closed room with little environment noise. De-noising is now important at this situation.

Most of the sound processing softwares, like Adobe Audition, GoldWave, Audacity and Samplitude, have professional de-noising filters. These filters usually require selecting a section of background noise (usually the 2~3 seconds silence before you start speaking), and start analyze the specification of the noise. When the analyse done, you can select the whole track to start the de-noising process.

Usually the de-noised tracks sounds very clear with the default presets. But if you are not satisfied, you can change some parameters before the whole track de-noising, and see if the result is satisfied.

5. Synchronizing the tracks

With all the tracks ready, you can now insert them into the video editing applications, clip the tracks into pieces and put them in the right place. You can also adjust the speed of the voiceover tracks or the original video if needed, but usually not recommended to do this.

With these 5 tips, you can now understand the voiceover better, and do your own if you have the chance. New skills acquired, yippee!

If you have any questions or want to share your way to manage the videos, just feel free to leave the comment down below. And don’t forget to check out or blog or our official website http://www.polyv.net for more information and useful tips!

See you in the next article, and happy video hosting!

[POLYV Insight] We’d Love to See This Spread Worldwide – Some Thoughts on 1-800-273-8255

We always emphasize “Content over form”, even in the era of Post-truth where everyone would believe what he wants to believe. Emotion takes over sense completely and the true calls are ignored.

Yet we still see some KOLs (Key opinion leaders) trying to change the post-truth environment – like American hip hop artist Logic and his work 1-800-273-8255, named after the phone number for National Suicide Prevention Lifeline (NSPL), a United States-based, toll-free suicide prevention hotline available to anyone in suicidal crisis or emotional distress.

American hip hop artist Logic performed 1-800-273-8255 on 2017 MTV’s Video Music Awards.

First released on April 28, 2017, this song drew the nation’s attention as the title showed the topic of suicide and caring about mental health. It later went more viral as the music video released on August 17, which centers around a young man who struggles with feeling accepted due to his sexuality; and the live performance of 2017 MTV’s Video Music Awards (VMA) ten days later, where Logic, along with co-performer Alessia Cara and Khalid and a group of suicide survivors, to express that everyone is born equal, and to urge everyone to fight against discrimination, bullying, domestic abuse and many more.

His effort soon paid off – According to the NSPL and other media reports, in the three weeks following the single’s release (April 28, 2017), calls directed to the NSPL rose by 27%, while visits to their website increased from 300,000 to 400,000 over the following months; and on the night of 2017 MTV VMA performance (August 27, 2017), the NSPL experienced a 50% surge in the number of calls to their hotline.

It sounds impossible, but that is reality – the call from Logic and fellow artists have made public focus and think about the issues of suicide and mental health nowadays, epecially for the new generations.

Frankly speaking, the music video of 1-800-273-8255 has deep topic and confronts more social issues like racism, school bullying, and recognition of sexual orientations. This is way different from many music videos today where the artist showed his fortune and inflated ego, not concerning for any humanistic care.

And for the cinematography, the dim ambient, the plot that goes with the lyric (I don’t wanna be alive→I want you to be alive→I finally wanna be alive) and the change of protagonist’s mind (happy→down→devastated→recovered from the past). They are the form and style that serve the content and topic very well.

What’s more, as many people comment, the title1-800-273-8255 is straightforward and can immediately relate to the hotline to call for help. I can’t stress that everyone remember the phone number because of Logic’s influence, but the title just stands out from those literal titles and effectively impressive to everyone.

And, as September 10 is World Suicide Prevention Day, the song as well as its music video and live performance, adds deeper meaning to this special day.

With great topic, excellent story-telling techniques and straightforward promotion, the work of 1-800-273-8255 is a positive example of speaking on important subjects and issues. And we would say, “We’d love to see this spread worldwide”.