Monday, November 14, 2005

Videoing a Motorcycle Event

Debbie and I went to the Texas FallOut Rally this weekend. You can click the title for more details and access to the online versions of the videos themselves. Anyway, I used the CAMP34 (alias DV250) to video some of the more entertaining events. I continue to be very impressed with how small and convenient the CAMP34 is to use, but I sure wish it didn't have an audio system that was so easy to overload. It worked fine for the events like the Loud Yelling contest, and the Miss UCOA Dressing event, where the wasn't a lot of background noise, but the motorcycle event totally blew the audio away. I took about 25 minutes of video, and there still seemed to be a lot of battery left. The visual quality is not the best, even in 640x480 format, but it is certaily good enough for web video like YouTube, where they scale everything down to about 320x240 size. I did discover that YouTube.com can't handle just any kind of Quicktime video. I originally video clips through FFmpegX, to convert the audio to MP3 from whatever the original camera AVI format was. Once this is done, I can play it in Quicktime just fine. The clips then consist of MPEG4 video and MP3 audio. I then used Quicktime Pro to create longer videos from the multiple clips and saved them as standalone .MOV files. What I found was that uploading one of these files to YouTube failed in conversion from .MOV to their Flash display format. So I then used Quicktime Pro's capability to export as an MP4 file as 320x240 resolution, and uploaded that to YouTube, and it worked just fine. YouTube might have been able to handle the original video from the camera, but I wanted to merge several of the clips together into a single video on the Barrel Racing video, so I didn't try the native clips.

Anyway, I am pretty happy with the results, but I am still looking.