A Few Bird Videos Posted

[Don DesJardin]

I had been looking at Vimeo for awhile now, but was always to busy to sign up, until I saw Per Johan's eagle that he posted. At that point I jumped in and signed on, and as a result, after a few trial and errors, posted a few bird videos. My first impression using Vimeo, was that the videos seemed washed out and not as good as watching them on my computer, but I think I'm getting used to it, since it's a free site to share ones work with others. I would encourage people to take advantage of it. The link below will take you to what I have posted so far.......

http://www.vimeo.com/1020774

[Per Johan Naesje]

Don, looked at your bird clips and as always beautiful done, good sound too!

My impression is that vimeo compression wash out some of the details and colors compared to the original uploaded clip!

Vimeo had some technical problems when I was uploading my capercailzie clip which was a huge file (200MB+), this upload was aborted due to those technical problems. Therefore I uploaded only a small QT-file 25MB, maybe some of the wash out lays here, the original is not good enough?

I will when I got some spare time try to upload a better file, then we can compare those two clips for details and color washing!

[Don DesJardin]

Thanks for your kind words. I don't exactly know what's going on with the Flash conversion, but it does have a way of making a good video clip look lifeless. I also suppose down converting the original source HDV also doesn't help. I tried encoding my avi files using different codecs, bit rates, and dimensions, and finally settled in on converting the files to divx files (using Doctor DivX), at 3072kbps, and sized them at 720 x 400. Have you thought of uploading an HD file. Take a look at this, it's pretty impressive for a HV30.

http://www.vimeo.com/1020774

Again, thanks for you comments, and please keep me and/or everyone updated on any break through you might have on encoding, bit rates, and dimensions to make uploads to Viemo better looking.

[Brendan Marnell]

4 colourful birds which look better than I've ever seen them and a rattler who declined to look you straight in the eye. Not only are they a joy to watch Don, but they kick my ass to edit something soon and remind my adoring public of ... never mind

[Dale Guthormsen]

don,

Very nice video clips of the birds, a couple of species i have nevere seen that well!!!

Thanks for sharing.

[J. Stephen McDonald]

Originally Posted by Don DesJardin

I had been looking at Vimeo for awhile now, but was always to busy to sign up, until I saw Per Johan's eagle that he posted. At that point I jumped in and signed on, and as a result, after a few trial and errors, posted a few bird videos. My first impression using Vimeo, was that the videos seemed washed out and not as good as watching them on my computer, but I think I'm getting used to it, since it's a free site to share ones work with others. I would encourage people to take advantage of it. The link below will take you to what I have posted so far.......

http://www.vimeo.com/1020774

Don, I ran across your bird videos on Vimeo a few days ago and enjoyed them a lot. You might put them back on there using the original HD, instead of the SD conversions.

I've been experimenting with several methods of converting my HD footage to post there. I went through a more than two-hour rendering onto H-264 with double-pass and B-frames, using 10 Mbps, for just 2 minutes of footage. After Vimeo's down-conversion to .flv at just 1.6 Mbps, this clip looked just slightly less sharp than the same one that took just 5 minutes to render with Windows Movie Maker, onto their HD-720p .wmv format, that uses single-pass and 5.9 Mbps. I've since started converting using the .wmv HD-1080p format, at 7.8 Mbps, as the result on Vimeo is slightly better.

However, the trick to getting the best HD playback on Vimeo, is to not even bother with playing it back from them directly and getting their sorry-looking .flv 1.6 Mbps, which gives jerky motion, even on the best videos. If you are registered with Vimeo and the contributor of a clip has set it to be available for downloading, you can go to the download button at the lower-right corner of each video's page. There you can download the original source upload from the contributor, before any Vimeo conversion. If you left-click on the button, you get a one-time playback, that won't be saved. If you right-click and then click on Save Target As, you can designate a folder on your computer and save it for repeated playings at the full bit-rate and in the format in which it was uploaded.

If you download Windows Media Encoder, you can add custom settings to the limited .wmv conversion format selection on the WMM publishing page. If you wanted to set it at 10 Mbps or 12 Mbps, you could, except it would use up more of your weekly 500 MB Vimeo uploading allotment. By setting the bit-rate higher, it wouldn't make the Vimeo .flv conversion look any better, but the downloaded clip that members could view or save, would be sharper. I have encouraged all my friends and interested people to register with Vimeo, so they would have this downloading privilege. By using a higher bit-rate in what I upload to Vimeo, those who download it get more quality and this has become my main consideration when using their service. I wish that more contributors would mark their clips as free for downloading. If you wanted people to see your videos at high-quality, you'd have to do the same. If you wanted to protect good videos from being used by those who would pirate them, you'd have to forego this option. The Download This Video pop-up that appears at the upper-right of a video, is just for a RealPlayer download that is too heavily compressed to be of much value.

There is a rumor that Vimeo will offer a Pro subscription in the future, but they aren't talking about it yet. You may have noticed that Chris Hurd has recently indicated that a video-hosting feature may soon be available here on DV Info------I haven't heard anything more about this for a couple of weeks, however.

Here's the link to my Vimeo page: http://www.vimeo.com/user458315/videos See the difference in them when played on Vimeo and after downloading. These HD videos look best in a 1,280 X 720 window, that fills about half the screen.

[John Abbey]

Don, if you like seeing your stuff in nice quality hidef, check out www.exposureroom.com

[J. Stephen McDonald]

http://www.dvinfo.net/conf/showthread.php?t=120126

[J. Stephen McDonald]

Originally Posted by John Abbey

Don, if you like seeing your stuff in nice quality hidef, check out www.exposureroom.com

I don't think they are kidding when they say this is in the Beta stage. I spent a couple of hours going through an awkward and barely workable registration process and then wasted two more trying to upload a video. They seem to want more information about you and everything else, than they should need. Every time I tried to complete a stage and press Save, it froze up. After trying again, I waited over an hour while it claimed to be "Almost Done" in uploading. Every time I looked at an instructional video, it wouldn't stop repeated playing and I had to exit the website to get it to stop. Maybe you or others have had better luck. There are a number of videos posted there that have fairly good HD quality. Maybe later these bugs I encountered will be worked out? This website makes Vimeo seem like a cakewalk, by comparison.

[Don DesJardin]

Stephen and all,
I'll be more than happy to upload some of my stuff to Vimeo in HD, as soon as I do an upgrade to my system by installing another disk with Windows XP, which should happen within a week. Currently I'm running Windows 2000 Pro which I will keep, and I'll just have a dual boot system. I have the software to capture and edit HD, but I do need XP to do it. Stephen, I did copy and save your notes, thanks. I'm not sure that Flash is the answer for HD, and it seems to be more complicated to get it right than it has to be. If I am going to send something in HD to someone to look at, I think that I would favor using MeGUI and Avisynth to encode a m2t to a mkv file using the x.264 codec. If interested, take a look at this to see what that end result looks like.

http://ibc.hbw.com/ibc/videos/Rampha...opygus_18g.mkv

It may not be the greatest example m2t to mkv, but it's fairly decent. Just to let you know, you will need the VLC Media Player to look at it. If you don't already have it, you can download it at http://www.videolan.org , your choice. Also, I have encoded a couple of the videos I have on Vimeo to flash myself, and they look better than the conversions on Vimeo, and I don't understand why. I'm wondering if I was to upload a video to Vimeo that has already been converted to Flash, whether or not Vimeo would reconvert it, or sense that it was already a Flash conversion and leave it alone. Currently I'm encoding all my avi files that I'm uploading to to Vimeo to DivX, which uses the h.264 codec, and I'm sizing them to 720 x 400 and using a bitrate of 3072kbps. This dialog has developed into a very interesting thread, so anyone who might have an interest in this, please feel free to jump in with comments, opinions, or preferences.

[Don DesJardin]

This is somewhat related to sites that provide free uploading of photos and videos. I have been using the Internet as much as possible since the mid 90's in the way of uploading bird photos, and recently with bird videos. I have always felt that if you want to be known to the outside world, exposure of your work is everything, and the Internet has allowed me to do this, and for the most part, it has been free.

A month ago, I was contacted by a production company that produces episodes for the series "Nova Science Now" for WBGH in Boston. During their search of the Internet for specific bird footage they needed for an episode they were working on called "Bird Brains", they ran across some of my footage that was on the Internet Bird Collection website. That resulted in me sending them a tape containing a selection of footage of the specific type they were looking for, and as a result, they used 54 seconds of 12 different birds. The program is scheduled to be televised July 16th on most PBS stations. It can also be seen on the "Nova Science Now" website after it's aired.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sciencenow/

[Brendan Marnell]

Originally Posted by Don DesJardin

..........A month ago, I was contacted by a production company that produces episodes for the series "Nova Science Now" for WBGH in Boston. During their search of the Internet for specific bird footage they needed for an episode they were working on called "Bird Brains", they ran across some of my footage that was on the Internet Bird Collection website. That resulted in me sending them a tape containing a selection of footage of the specific type they were looking for, and as a result, they used 54 seconds of 12 different birds. The program is scheduled to be televised July 16th on most PBS stations. It can also be seen on the "Nova Science Now" website after it's aired.

I wonder will the editor's choice of 54 seconds of your best material reveal that the attention span of Nova Science viewers is deemed to be 11 seconds x 5 or 5 seconds x 11 or even 2.5 seconds x 22. Perhaps, given the endless acreage of waffle and piffle on telly, the great news is that it is soon about to be interrupted by good wildlife video from one of the best I know. Well done Don and many happy returns and repeats.

[Don DesJardin]

Even if the 54 seconds of footage is divided up among 12 different scenes of 4-7 seconds, it's still a lot of footage of something they didn't have to complete the episode, which is only ~20 minutes long. The footage is very specific and of singing birds, and is only meant to support the dialog and theme of the story, which is how birds learn their songs, and is very closely related to how human infants learn how to talk, which is also part of the story. In case anyone is wondering, yes I did get paid for what footage was used.

[Brendan Marnell]

I would love to see the finished 20 minutes, Don. Any news that National Geographic or Discovery or Nature or even BBC may be showing it would be welcome in Europe.

My birdsong is limited to the hoopoe on IBC & Bird Cinema and good audio of a superb mistle thrush aria from Extremadura, Spain. I'm 3 years searching for video to go with it.

[Dale Guthormsen]

Don,

It is great when hard work pays off!!!! You have a lot of terrific footage and I know it does not come easy!!!

I will go to their web site and see it after it is on the web.