Playing with Video

As regular readers will know; I`ve been playing around with video on some of my walks and want to take my movie camera on the Dales Way with me.

All the video's are put together in Windows Movie Maker (WMM) which comes with all versions of Windows, for the moving photographs I use PhotoStory 3 which can be downloaded from Microsoft.

In WMM the movie video's can be saving in a multitude of ways i.e. DV-Avi for high quality video to 'video for dial up (38kbps)'; I normally save my movies at 768kbps. Once the video clips are made into a movie, they are uploaded to Youtube. When the files are uploaded; Youtube converts them to flash files (.flv) and compresses them down to about 300kbps, this is why the pictures can look badly pixelated sometimes.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been looking at ways to try and get a better video up but this can only be achieved by having the original 768kbps file playing.

One site that seems to allow this is upfordown.com with them you get 500MB Space, 5GB Bandwidth monthly, max file upload 50MB.

Using this service does mean a little bit of work on the users part as you have to work out the html code to make a player, play on your blog, unlike Youtube where you can just grab the code and embed it in the blog.

Obviously little review items like the freeloader one, can be saved at a lower kbps I saved that at 512kbps mainly because the picture didn't need to look that clear and a bit of pixelation doesn't matter that much.

Below are two video clips of the same video, saved at 768kbps on WMM. The file size is 7.5 MB

The first is the Youtube one, the second is hosted on upfordown.







When both clips are played together you can see the difference in the picture quality especially in areas like the font on the opening; the second one is much sharper and clearer, also the water and sky looks smooth and not blurred.

Clearly the video's are never going to be the same as a DV-mini camera or HD but with any luck I will be able to post a much better quality video in future.