JacksenTube #3: Swimming In Data

I finally got it! When I came home from work on Thursday, Jacksen was happy just lying on the couch when he started talking as he always does. Except this time I had the camera ready and he had lots on his mind. We hear this every day but few friends and family have heard it before now.

There may be more video coming - I have 24 GB of DV eating up my hard drive right now. I need an easy way to back this stuff up! Converting to XviD in nearly-equal-to-DV quality compresses it down to 3 GB but still, it's a lot. I'd like to retain the originals if I can. So far I can only think of these ideas:

• Seven or eight data DVDs, unplayable on a DVD player of course. This is probably cheapest but I don't trust writable DVDs over time so I'd have to re-write onto new discs periodically. I can't loose this footage and I'm bad at maintaining schedules like that.


• Buy a huge hard drive and external USB 2.0 enclosure. Expensive, but I'd say more reliable than DVDs over time. It is, however, prone to physical damage which would render all content lost.


• Buy more DV tapes and forget the computer methods. This may be the best option. Tape lasts a long time and they're only $10 for an hour. It doesn't, however, allow me to edit the video and back up the edited copies since I don't have a software DV encoder.

If anyone has suggestions I'm all ears.

JacksenTube #2

Last month Jacksen was the actor, sneezing and cooing. This month, unfortunately, he's more of an observer of his crazy parents.

This time I encoded the video properly so I linked in the high-quality version. It may take a but longer to start playing but the difference is worth it.

For future reference, I used the same steps as last time except I encoded at 10,240 kbps video and 96 kbps audio.

JacksenTube

Three things I know for sure. One, I wanted to see how to get the best quality video on YouTube. Two, Jacksen is starting to make more interesting sounds than crying. Three, many of you are dying to see boring home movies. So my first experiment in YouTube broadcasting stars Jacksen and has the un-cut, raw feel only parents wishing to capture every moment can create. Enjoy all three and a half minutes.

Update - Stormy asked how I got the video from camera to YouTube and I should've put it in here so I can refer to it next time. There were a lot of steps that video went through and it's still not perfect but it's pretty good for the first attempt. Most of the time was spent trying different combinations of filter and compression settings.

Amazingly, I used free software at every step and they were all high-quality.

1. Copy 850 MB DV file from camera with WinDV.


2. Open video in VirtualDub.


3. Set up Smart Deinterlacer, Resize, Levels and Sharpen filters.


4. Process video and save as XviD, 640x480, 2-pass, 1024 kbps, 29.97 fps. Save audio as Lame MP3, 48 kHz, 64 kbps, mono.


5. Upload 27 MB video to YouTube and let them re-compress to 320x240.

I screwed up on the aspect ratio though. This version looks fine but the high-quality versions YouTube offers are squished. I accidentally flagged the video as widescreen.

Next I need to find a good video editing app. The free ones all seem to suck in different ways.