Friday, December 22, 2006

Sharing Video - My First Time With YouTube

So there I was with the hottest video in the identity sphere in my hands and I had to figure out some way to share it with the rest of the world. I couldn't put this on my own web site as that would kill my bandwidth even if just one person took a look at it. Of course, the first thing that came to mind was YouTube.

There was a problem, though. My video was shot on my Canon Powershot SD800IS camera and was almost 800MB long (thankfully I had my 4GB SD card in there) (and to give proper credit, the video was shot by Pat as I was one of the "stars"). YouTube has limits on the length of a video (both in time - 10 Mins - and in size - 100MB). On top of that, the video was filmed under less than optimal lighting and audio conditions.

So I went poking around the internet to see if I could find some MPEG 4 compression software to see if I could reduce the size. I tried two different packages and even with reducing the video size to 320x240 (¼ of its original size), the size of the files were coming out to be 300+MB -- still too large.

So it looked like I was going to have to split the video into pieces and upload it one piece at a time -- not the best solution and definitely not the one I wanted to use. On top of that, neither of the software kits I had downloaded had any editing capability, so I needed to find another solution.

Then it hit me, I had a copy of Roxio Easy CD/DVD Creator (now Easy Media Creator) installed and since it could create DVDs, I figured it had some video processing software... A quick search found VideoWave. I started it up and did a quick test by cutting it at the 2 minute mark and generating the video file. Amazingly, that turned out to be only like 15 MB, so then I knew I could put the whole thing into a single file!

After processing and watching, it was clear to me that people who did not have the lyrics sitting in front of them would have a very hard time following along and even those that did still would have a problem (I did).

So back to the drawing board and looking at VideoWave options, I could add text, so I went and over a period of a few hours (and lots of listening) I added subtitles to the entire song. I'm sure there was probably a better way to do it, but I did get it done and only once lost some of my work because of a program crash (which did lead to more frequent saves).

Uploaded the 41MB video to YouTube (that took a while, even with my T1), added a link to it on my blog and the rest is history!

Tags : / / / / /

No comments: