Question:
I'm being considered for a position where one of the responsibilities is to
create video files that are played in Real Player. (the videos are created
by an in-house studio). Does anyone know how this is done? What is the
learning curve for this? I have most of the other requirements for the job.
Maybe looking at this will give you a better idea of what's involved...
http://www.realnetworks.com/products/producer/index.html
To be honest, I've not yet put video on the web, but I've been working with digital video - which uses the same formats that the Realsystems Producer Plus (Reals' web streaming authoring software) uses for source material - for about 5 years now. Learning how to handle digital video should not be difficult for someone intelligent enough to code a site.
From the sound of your post, at most you'd have to learn how to digitize the video, encode it for web streaming and upload it to the servers. If the in-house video studio is working in the digital domain, chances are you won't even have to know how to digitize because the video will already be "in the computer" and will only need to be transferred to your computer to be encoded for RealPlayer distribution.
Go For It!
HTH and Good Luck
And if you do need to digitize the video, I don't think it's very difficult. You will need a video capture card on the computer. You connect a VCR or video camera to the capture card and run the video; the card captures it and digitizes it. Then you edit it as necessary (clip to what you want, adjust brightness/contrast/etc., add/remove sound, etc.) using video editing software, encode for RealPlayer using RealProducer, and upload the .rm file to the server.
I haven't done all this yet, but this is what my research has led me to.
More info here: http://www.realnetworks.com/products/rvcreation/index.html