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The FLV format (Flash Live Video) can be viewed on most operating systems. Over 90% of all computers come preloaded with flash players of some kind. If not, Adobe Flash Player can be quickly downloaded and installed without having to reboot the computer. So you may want to try an .flv format.

A good choice for TV is mpeg2. Smaller file size than avi and the quality is still excellent. From the viewer's (Greg's) side, a player that plays virtually every type of video and audio file, VLC Media Player is great. I have yet to find a format that won't play on that player.

Or Ernie you could just chop your video down to just under 10 minutes and put it up on YouTube. That way everyone could watch it without player problems. I've converted Sydney's riding videos into mpeg2, uploaded them to YouTube and the High Quality version is still very nice.

A very good source of info for all of this is CreativeCow.net. Arron Rabinowitz has some great training on the subject.

- Andy

I know what you mean about being able to view in very high quality. But you also want to think about what your audience wants. The audience, for the most part, wants immediate access to your video. No waiting. That's the benefit of streaming in FLV. They also probably wouldn't quibble too much about your quality. The HQ setting on your YouTube video is quite acceptable in my opinion.

Perhaps you could have 2 choices for your audience. One with the YouTube version. And another from an HD site that renders truly excellent quality or a downloadable file that provides the same... like your .wmv in a post above.

In any case, nice video! Kudos also for showing your "return to earth" landing. A lesser man would have faded it out before the landing or not shown it at all. And in continuing your trend of keeping us all honest, your landing has a striking similarity to my last two landings.

- Andy

I was going to send this via email to Ernie but decided that since there seems to be a lot more people flying with video cameras that I'd share a few things I've learned.

Unfortunately, YouTube can be frustrating because as soon as you send off your lovely video file that you have spent so much time on, the YouTube compressor gets a hold of it and does what it wants. They used to use the Sorenson Flash codec but who knows what native settings they currently have. Sort of a flavor of the week thing.

They also take your file that's wider than their native compressor settings and squash it down. You probably noticed that your YouTube version of your nice, downloadable .wmv file is much narrower. Well, they didn't crop it, they squashed it to a narrower pixel width.

You never know what you are going to get with YouTube. For example, before they had the Normal Quality (NQ) and High Quality (HQ) toggle, the only way to get a high quality video was to exactly match the native Sorenson codec in your production process so that the compressor would go, "Oh, this file is exactly the way I want it already. So I'm not going to compress it hardly at all" and you'd have a very nice quality video... even without the high quality feature.

My nephew is a film and TV production graduate so with his help I tried to match the YouTube native settings. This was pre-high quality option days. But even with a lot of tinkering I just couldn't match their settings. This was the best I could do. It's of my daughter Sydney at Doran Beach with her horse. If you watch it in HQ, you can see that it's still a little rough.

Sydney On The Beach, Lots Of Formatting Trys

But then after they had settled down on their HQ format, I uploaded the same video but just in a standard mpeg2 format. Nothing special. Check out the difference in quality at the HQ setting. Better.

Sydney In Standard Mpeg2 Format

Anyway, you can only go so far with YouTube before you start to get annoyed. If you want to be able to play your HD videos, you should check out Vimeo. I've seen some REALLY good HD videos there. Amazing quality. I think a video hosting service that allows you to upload whatever you want (ie, no compressor on their end) is the way to go when it comes to HD.

As far as what kind of movie production software you should use, I use PowerDirector 6. It's not the latest version and I don't know if it can do what you want in the HD department. But they have a really good forum where these PowerDirector experts are very helpful at answering your questions. Ask them if the latest PowerDirector version can handle and render HD in the way you want.

Isn't video production a pain in the rear end?

- Andy

Go Ernie, Go!!!

Having just 2 tracks for audio doesn't affect your ability to mix sound, fade one song to another, etc. Audio is no different than video; you can splice it, dice it and do just about everything to it.

In PowerDirector, it's a very simple matter of fading one in and another one out, adding in commentary, etc. You can even strip the audio from the video track and turn it into it's own separate audio file and put it somewhere else.

In a video I'm doing from our bare boat catamaran cruise we did around Antigua in March, I had music playing then faded out the music to the background while bringing up the native sound (so you could hear everyone cheer as our two catamarans sailed past each other) then faded the native sound out completely while bring the music track volume back up. Very easy to do.

Another cool feature that you can add to PowerDirector, and I'm sure other video editors, is SmartSound. Check it out. Makes matching your music track to the exact length of your video segment, no matter how long or short the video, a breeze. I used SmartSound on this video. That's why the music ends perfectly with the ending of the video. I also used SmartSound with the opening text of this video.

And... you would think it would be a snap to find good quality, royalty free music. It isn't. One approach I've used is to find an artist who will say it's ok to use their music just so long as you give them credit at, say, the end of your video. If you want to avoid copyright infringement, finding good music that doesn't cost you an arm and a leg is a chore.

- Andy