So we got to Uptown Lounge, and decided on Calamari as the fun-food while we “got our martini on”. We tried out the camera in low-light, but it didn’t work out at all, which was to be expected since I hadn’t read the manual. I had no idea of what I might have been able to change to produce the best setting.

Anyway… X hours later, we headed for a pizza shop, where I shot an extremely mellow (for ME) video with my new, fresh-out-of-the-box Samsung NV3. :D

When I got home, I plugged the camera in via USB and uploaded the videos really quickly. They open up in AVI format, 640×480, as advertised:

Format: XVID Decoder, 640 x 480, Millions
Audio: Microsoft ADPCM, Mono, 22.050 kHz
FPS: 30
Data Rate: 1615.81 kbits/sec

Here’s where things got tricky. :D Originally, I loaded the clips to my iMac. As soon as they uploaded, I double-clicked one of them and it appeared in Quicktime Player. I played it immediately, and it had these black clipping blotches where the camera was aimed directly at bright lights, like the menu signs in the pizza shop. I figured this had to do with the camera and that I didn’t read the manual before just pointing and shooting. So then, I went to transfer the videos to my MacBook, and they didn’t run at all. Quicktime Player would open the first frame of the cips, but it would “quit unexpectedly” when I pressed play. I tried restarting and rebooting. No difference. I looked in the manual on the disk, which is way more extensive than the hardcopy they give you, and it said to install the XviD codec.

To install the XviD codec, you have to install DivX. I installed both and rebooted. I opened the clip in Mpeg Streamclip, and the “blowout blotches” were gone, except there was a large section that glitched at the bottom of the pizza shop counter, where there were no lights at all. I figured the problem had something to do with interlacing. I could be wrong, but the programs were looking for interlaced video, and the NV3 shoots 30 frames per second. That’s different from 29.97 frames per second, and that’s certainly different from 60 interlaced fields per second like NTSC television has. I decided to render the video that had this one large glitch in it out to DV codec, using Mpeg Streamclip. I could have exported to Mpeg-4, but I wanted to see if it would look good in DV, since most of the time, I’ll want to bring the clips into FCP for editing.

I rendered to DV and resampled the 22 kHz audio to 48 kHz for the same FCP compatibility reasons. The DV file opened up in quicktime player, looked good and ran flawlessly. I imported that file into Compressor and used my iPod settings to make the m4v to send to blip and iTunes. I cropped the end of the video in Compressor.

After that test, I changed the flow. I made it so that all AVI files open in Mpeg Streamclip. I selected in and out points by pressing “I” and “O” where I wanted my in and out to be for the clip. I selected “export to mpeg-4″ with the settings of 50% quality, 1100 kbps data rate, sound AAC 44.1 kHz stereo (even though the NV3 records in 22 kHz mono) @ 96 kbps, 640×480, upper field and everything else deselected. I got the same results, except the file was named mp4 instead of m4v.

I was very happy with the results. The colors are a little oversaturated, but like I said, I never read the manual, and the video’s straight out of the box. Insert battery, insert 2gig memory card, spin the dial, point & shoot. I barely knew how to play the videos back on the camera at the time. :D

Anyway… A good time was had by all… as you can probably tell from the video! :D I’m definitely looking forward to ReelSolid.TV expanding past the borders of the U.S.A.! We’ll get to find out what’s going on in Japan from Masami, and what’s going on in France from Laetitia. Cheers to both of the ladies for helping me to NOT waste my day! :D

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I received a comment today regarding the download times of my videos along with some suggestions on how I could improve those times. I hadn’t been thinking about it in a long time, but it caused me to consider the way this site was built, and also what my procedures are in posting vlogs.

Initially, I was just building a site to hold videos as a source for my iTunes feed. I wasn’t really thinking about people watching them from the site. One of the first problems I had was that most people access my site with PCs, not macs, and a lot of them couldn’t properly view Quicktime movies. I wasn’t aware of Flash at the time… well, not as far as universal video access. I was aware of the program itself. Anyway… I made AVI files, which are completely archaic, and posted those for the windows viewers. Again, this was an afterthought, because the site was intended to be an iTunes feed, so I was neither concerned nor interested in whether ANYONE could view the videos from the site, especially PCs. By the time I started looking at the stats and saw the overwhelming percentage of PC and IE viewers over Mac and Safari users (most of which also happened to be MYSELF, since testing the links was adding to my stats :/ ), it was too late, until I decided to make my primary format Flash.

As far as the MOV or MP4 files, again, their purpose was to sit on an iPod and look pretty. :) Even though I selected ‘fast start’, and maybe even ‘compressed headers’, since the goal wasn’t streaming them over the net, I encoded them at as high a rate as I was comfortable with, which was ~ 2,048 Kbps. So.. .for someone that just plugs their iPod in and lets iTunes download videos, everything’s cool. For someone trying to watch the Quicktime file from the direct download link, my videos are going to DL slooooowly, compared to other videos of the same size (and potentially the same quality).

I really stopped thinking about it when I went to Flash, but today’s comments have prompted me to consider re-encoding the MP4s to be more internet-friendly.

Having said all that, there’s another issue. Time.

I really like the difference that H.264 makes over MP4. H.264 looks great @ 700 Kbps, even if you expand the frame size from the encoded 320×180. Unfortunately, H.264 takes FOR.EV.VER to encode. When I’m trying to post something day-of, I’m trying to get it on the site ASAP. That means I will most likely use the 2,048 Kbps MP4, which encodes MUCH faster. It also might mean I use 1-pass CBR/VBR on a flash video instead of 2-pass VBR. Flash is another issue, because now I’m aware of On2 VP6, except *that* takes even LONGER to encode than H.264! :/ So I end up using Sorenson so I can accomplish ANYTHING ELSE during my day besides encoding a video.

Clearly, since you can make the same quality H.264 video at about 1/3 the data rate of MP4, it’s going to DL faster, which is better for the viewer… but worse for the encoder! :) Perhaps the best deal is a dual-tier process where I put up the ‘fast’ version, then let the ‘better’ version render overnight. Anyway… this is what happens when you build a site from scratch, and go through several page format changes and several video format changes during the process.

Let me not even MENTION iframes! :/

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