Tuesday, November 28, 2006

Uploading video - oh the joy

I wanted to upload the video I took of the switching on of the Christmas lights. As I have a Flickr account it seemed to make sense that I use the Yahoo Video service, no need to sign up again. I log in with my YahooID and password as I do for Flickr and head for the video uploading page. Uh-huh okay how do I stop it from saying 'this is a video from [YahooID]' and substitute 'this is a video from FlipC'? I'm not keen on saying

Hello here's half of my login details can you guess the rest?
No options, none. I can create a secondary profile, but that's still a login name and amusingly videos still show up with "Source [main YahooID]" Nasty security risk. I tried anyway and to check switched to another, unlogged in, computer to see how it displays, yep there's my login name for all to see. Oh and no sound either.

So I've looked at Google Video, yippee at first glance it appears that the display name is not the same as the login details. It demands both a first and last name, easily solved, but it won't let me upload anything until I confirm my email address. <taps fingers> I'm waiting...

In the meantime I need to think about another couple of movies I took, this time in Kidderminster, they're portrait format (that is 480x640) so of course all the video players show them turned 90° from true. Canon's own viewer won't turn them, so I'm left with only two options - VirtualDub, which is not exactly user friendly and means re-encoding them; or putting them back onto the SD card and seeing if the camera itself has a 'rotate movie' function. I'm not setting many hopes on the latter. It seems ridiculous with this amount of software and hardware about that neither Canon's software nor Microsoft's Movie Maker will do this. I can't be the first to meet this particular problem.

Microsoft's function is indeed useless for movies, turn a 640x480 tilted movie into a 640x480 correctly orientated one, fine if you don't mind everyone looking like obese dwarfs. Honestly "Hey this movie is now 480x640, I can only use 640x480. I'll proportionally resize it and add black borders to bring it up to spec" how hard is that if televisions can do similar with the various formats shown on their screens?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I've had the same trouble with my video clips from my camera. I have to keep reminding myself that I need to film everything in landscape mode! It does seem so silly, when it appears to be so simple to rotate a still image. I'm not pretending to understand how it all works, though. I just like taking the pics and then looking at them (occasionally try turning them into 'Art'), and have no clue about the technology involved.
I hadn't even thought of the security risk involved in signing up to a video host. I'm sure I saw that Photobucket were hosting video, too, now. Must investigate further. Please let me know if you find a foolproof solution!

FlipC said...

I hope that Rotating videos the Virtual Dub way is of help to you. It is silly what you have to do, especially considering that Microsoft have got it almost right with a simple effect.

The Google video upload seems to be happily anonymous in what Joe Public sees, and as a bonus I suspect you should be able to use it straight away from your normal beta blogger login. It does take a little time for the videos to be processed and made live, but it's not a huge delay when you consider how many they're dealing with.

The interface is quite easy, if you're uploading a file greater then 100MB then you'll need their separate downloader, all-in-all it's a bit like Flickr really. Sadly there are no internal video editing tools yet; this being Google though I'm sure it's only a matter of time.