Category Archives: Video

Youtube HD and iPhone Video

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This time a video shot with my iPhone 4. I went through the same steps. I made the film in iMovie and then processed it again with Handbrake to get a MP4 and uploaded onto Youtube. I had no problems, except that when it got uploaded I didn’t see the HD option. I went and learned a little bit about how HQ video uploads work on Youtube. You need to have at least a 24fps video at 480×360 (something like that) and a bitrate of at least 600 kbps if it’s H.264 or 900 kbps if its XVid. I know I’ve got at least a 1280×720 resolution video at 30fps. The bitrate seemed on the low side after the MP4 compression, but lo-and-behold it seems to have turned out just fine. The key is just to be patient and wait for the HQ version to finish processing — that’s my hunch. Here’s the embedded link:

One last thing. Uploading video from the iPhone to Youtube is acceptable but (obviously?) you can’t do the full on HD quality video. If you goto Photo Album and try to email the video it’ll automatically be compressed down for transfer. This is the a video I transferred from my iPhone of the Boing-Boing picnic we went to this weekend.

Some other tidbits: Due to the WordPress theme I’m using, when I go to embed Youtube videos into my blog, I need to use a custom window size. I set the width to 480 and the height is automagically figured out. You can full screen the video and play it at 720p. At least for the Golden Gate one.

More videos to come. I’d also like to play with doing stop-motion animation too since I have a bunch of Figmas that need to be played with one day.

Youtube Video

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Now that I’ve got an iPhone 4 and I can take 720p video, I’m interested in seeing what I can post on Youtube and on this blog.

As a first test, this video isn’t taken with my iPhone, but rather my Canon A480 P&S camera. It’s a stop-motion animation of a Nanoblock 5-story Pagoda I bought while I was in Japan. I figured this would be a good test case.

Some lessons learned about uploading to Youtube:

I’m using iMovie on the Mac for starters. It doesn’t export H.264 but just a QT .MOV format. If you want to edit short videos with iMovie and expect to upload it to YouTube at 720p you’re out of luck. Youtube hates that. Every time I tried to upload from iMovie it would compress it down to crap. Even if I took the exported MOV file and uploaded it Youtube complained that it wasn’t in the right format and yet tried to work with the data anyway, but the end result was less than stellar.

So here’s what I did: I edited and exported my movie with iMovie as a Quicktime MOV format. I downloaded Handbrake and re-compressed the MOV into an H.264 MP4 file and I uploaded that to Youtube. Youtube still bitched about the audio not being correct and begrudgingly munched on the data anyway and uploaded it. Since there’s no audio, I didn’t give a rat’s ass and you can see the video here.

I want to try and upload a video from my iPhone to Youtube next and I’ll post something about that on here. I’d also like it if WordPress 3.0 with all its new-fangled capabilities to show the embedded Youtube or let me upload video to the blog itself, but the latter seems to be a no-go. From my experience it’s simply broken. I don’t know if that’s because my webhost can’t handle it, or if WordPress is a pile. Maybe it doesn’t like you uploading a 720p video. Maybe there’s some hidden MB cap that I need to increase before it’ll take the entire file. The Nanoblock video is 29 MBs so I figure it’s giving WordPress a heart attack about 40% of the way through (that’s how far it gets before it croaks).