Youtube is now making some high resolution videos available. If you find a video you'd like to watch, you can add the following text to the webpage address, "&fmt=6" (without the quotes) to get a better picture. For the higher quality version you might need to wait a bit longer than for the normal version, because the size of the file is bigger, so it takes more time to download.

For example you can take a look at these two videos and compare the difference:-

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAE2-FQHkok
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QAE2-FQHkok&fmt=6

For the more technically oriented, there's a greasemonkey script available to automatically show the high-res video if available.

Also if you add "&fmt=18" instead of &fmt=6 you'll get the video in mp4 format instead of the usual .flv format usually used by youtube.

Via Hackzine

Are you so poor you cannot afford a video ipod, yet you still want to get the best out of google video presentations?

Google techtalks are talks and presentations about a diverse range of subjects which make perfect candidates for ipod listening. For most of the talks you can afford to sacrifice the powerpoint presentation and listen only to the audio. To extract the audio from a google video follow these steps:-

Software Required:-

• Google video player
• GVI2AVI Converter
• Media Coder

1. Locate the file you want to download and save it to disk. This saves a gvp file of around 2kb on your drive.

2. Open the file with google video player. When you open the gvp file with google video player a gvi file is created. The gvi file is the actual video file (around 300mb for an hour of video). The default folder on windows is my documentsMy videosGoogle videos.

3. Convert the gvi file into an avi file using GVI2AVI, to be able to manipulate it.

4. Use media coder to extract the mp3 file from the avi file

The easiest way to extract a clip from a DVD is using DVD Ripper. The program allows you to extract movie clips and export them to the most common file formats. It also gives you the option to resize video and controlling the output quality. The good thing about DVD ripper is that it selects the codecs to use automatically and shields you from excessive detail and confusing options, while producing good results.

1. Download DVD Ripper and install it – Even though this isn't free software AoA media give you a 30 day trial option which will allow you to extract a 10 minute movie – the maximum size for youtube, perfect!
2. Load a DVD by pressing the "+ Load a DVD button" and select a DVD drive.
3. Select Movie Clip and check the box near the title you want to extract from. (See how to know which title to select below).
4. Set the duration of the clip from the dialog box that opens after clicking the clip.
5. Select the file format to convert to (I use avi for standard extractions and flv for youtube)
6. Change any settings (optional) and click start.

How to know which title to select
To know which title to select play the DVD in you favourite DVD player (Power DVD, VLC, Mplayer, Windows Media Player). From the program’s navigation menu locate the clip you want to extract by browsing through the titles. Take note of the title number and select the same title number in DVD Ripper.

Related:
   How to backup a DVD (even if it has copy protection)

References:
   DVD Ripper Help

At last this weekend I got out of my video lethargy and actually got some work done. The whole problem was starting. I spent too much time worrying what to do and what music to choose that would have been better spent doing something. It isn't as difficult as I tend to think. I essentially adopted the same approach to audio as I did to video trimming.

• Listen to the clip's sound and if the sound is unusable delete the audio clip
• Realise that the sequence of the clips in not important if the clips are unrelated so you can move clips that fit well in music parts.
• The video clip shouldn't necessarily remain attached to its audio. In fact now most clips are unlinked with their audio. It's much easier to edit like this.
• I freely made use of dummy files to make notes in the time line. I insert a dummy file then rename it to the comment of what needs to be done and next time I've got the information in front of me.
• Check whether the clip has more sound at the beginning and the end, they might have a better sound that can be used instead of the current.
• Create audio timelines and open them in another timeline window. Collect samples of reusable sounds like the sea, then edit them with Audition to create one sound clip that can be used whenever required.

I finished the rough cut trimming process of all 8 tapes a week ago and since then I'm still finding all types of excuses to avoid working on the project. In the mean time I organised my mp3 collection, edited the blog video snippets, downloaded loads of latino songs, sent one or two well pitched CVs and read lots of stuff about testing - hardly anything to do with video editing.

On Saturday I exported the first hour of video on tape with a whole series of problems between the video camera and premier pro. Every 10-20 minutes either the camera or premier kept stopping abruptly for no apparent reason. Premier behaves really strange when exporting to tape sometimes, and the solution to the problem was a restart of the application with the camera switched off, for whatever it's worth.

On Sunday I bothered to sit down in front of the TV and watch the whole first rough cut of the video. I was hesitant to 'waste' an hour watching the video but I must say this was a very important step that paid its worth. While watching the video I made notes on what clips need to be trimmed, sequences reordered, voice overs, bad sound, good sound etc. For the 1 and a half hour spent watching the video I spent only 2-3 hours the following two days making the necessary modifications.

The trick at this stage was to leave the music clip selection process for later on, until I could find the time to choose the music clips as the soundtrack. I created two dummy offline clips of 1 minute each, one for music and the other for voice overs and whereever there was the need for music I inserted the dummy clip. Now all I've got to do in the newly edited timeline is to go through the offline clips and replace them with actual songs. Pretty nifty eh.

At school I used to find all types of excuses not to do my homework and the same is happening with my video editing. Today I overshot my morning coffee break with 1hr surfing blog explosion to get enough credits for another blog battle.

Since last Monday I've been trimming the pre selected clips to remove any extra footage. This is a butcher's knife trim that is serving as a weed killer. I'm planning to trim around 50% - 70% of the original 7 hour footage.

To make this process faster I'm not trimming audio for the time being. I'm still listening to the original audio in the tracks and if I think the audio only should be retained I'm copying the audio section in the second muted audio track. Sometimes especially when editing noisy tracks (such as boat rides) turning down the audio helped me judge the better visual scenes.

If this is your first episode of this journey then take a minute to read this note.

Weather:

Costs:

Just before landing in Quito airport there's one thing that's guaranteed to cross your mind – the catastrophic consequence an airline crash will have near the airport. The Quiport like the rest of Quito lies in a valley but unlike any other airport we've been to it's strangely surrounded by buildings. Inside the architecture is modern and I must admit that I awaited much worse. At 8am everything was working as it should and we passed through immigration with no hassles or incredulous looks at the passport, although I doubt it came out of familiarity with our country. After collecting our luggage we took a taxi to the bus station 'Terminale Terrestre'.

The taxi driver dropped us in front of a stairs leading to a square where we should have found the ticket offices but instead we somehow ended up in a telephone cabin office instead. After putting some of last month's Spanish lessons to use we managed to find the ticket office and the bus to Banos. The trip promised to be culturally rich from the start my Madam pointed at a policeman pissing on the front of a bus. The bus to Banos, probably free of piss, was relatively modern but the people inside gave just the perfect retro touch to remind us that we were in Ecuador.

The characters on this bus became imprinted in memory and will probably remain there for a long time, at least until I continue hearing 'A Banos', 'A Banos' reverberating in my mind. This was the call the bus attendant or as I preferred referring to him, the bus sales man, was calling out at each stop. No matter were we stopped, be it to let people off or to wait in the traffic, the attendant called out at the top of his voice to load more passengers. His tactics were fruitful because the bus kept replenishing itself with people. Then there was the bus driver who must have been under an accumulated adrenaline rush out of watching Fast and Furious, because we were close to smash against other vehicles throughout the whole 3½ hour trip. Lastly there were the bus vendors 'vendedores' who came on the bus handing over things like 'medical tea' or 'special ball pens' trying to convince us in very fast Spanish why we couldn't live without their goods. At least we made a deal with the best one of the bunch who was a traditional musician that played his flute and guitar on the bus and sold us 2 CD's with traditional Ecuadorian songs for $5. (Click on image to download video)

When we arrived in Banos after passing through Latacunga and Ambato we caught a taxi ($1) from the bus station to Hotel Palace for practical reasons rather than because of the distance. Hotel Palace is one of the higher end hotels along with the Sangay Hotel listed in Lonely Planet but this hotel offered a better price and a better e-mail response than the latter.

We spent the rest of the afternoon walking around the streets of Banos trying to take some representative photos of the village. While returning back to the hotel we came across a local artisan who made Salasacan weavings. When the lady saw us staring at her work displayed on the veranda she welcomed us inside for a better view. We tried to understand as much as possible from her explanation in Spanish but the only things we understood were that the wool used was sheep wool and it is naturally dyed and water resistant. Her best piece took her 3 weeks to complete and was selling at $35. We left the house with a piece depicting two blue footed boobies but this also allowed us to take some photos of her art without feeling guilty. After the walking tour we went to eat at a Mexican Restaurant called Panco Villa. The food was good, but the place was empty. We had cheese nachos, chicken and beef hard tacos and natural (thick) juice all for $12.

  

Today I have finished the capturing and renaming phase after a whole week working after hours. I've discarded all the completly useless clips and each time saved between 1-3GB of disk space when copying the clips to a new location from Premier's Project Manager.

After completing this phase I've basically watched at all the video and am now ready to start the actual editing phase. My only doubt at this point is whether the step just completed was really necessary and whether starting to edit immediately would have saved time. For starters though I found the clip renaming useful when this afternoon my movie star wanted to watch some specific clips and unlike usual I was able to please her immediately. Apart from this I am also feeling a sense of achievement after completing this phase, something I wouldn't dream of thinking about if I were to have started editing directly.

From the project created yesterday I imported batches of the captured clips into a timeline and started watching the clips chronologically. Every 5 / 10 clips or sequence of events, I deleted the completely unusable clips from the timeline and renamed each valid clip. The discarded clips were absolute disaster clips or backup replicas that could be deleted.

The naming convention used for the retained clips was Location/Time Sequential Order - Description.avi e.g. "Pre 01 - Airport queue out pan.avi", or "Banos 05 - Waterfall water closeup.avi", or "Banos 05 - Duck sound effect.avi". This naming convention retains the chronological sequence of events for each particular place using the reference number after the location and describes the scene. A proper description of the contents of the scene will help determine why the scene was taken and retained, a sort of self documenting procedure especially useful for scenes with the same content. In the Tanzania video I had scenes named zebra 01, zebra 02, etc. but this wasn't very helpful when trying to locate specific scenes during the later editing stages.

I timed myself during each 30 minutes of the tape. The total time taken to edit the first 30 minutes that I had previously watched the previous day was approx 2hr (excluding yesterday's 45 minutes). The second 30 minutes that I only watched once during this phase took only 1hr 20mins. I arrived at the conclusion that I can safely proceed without watching the video capture stage thus saving about 1hr for each tape. There was no additional benefit in either time or ease/quality of clips selection to warrant the need of watching the capture stage.

I created a new temporary Premier Pro project to store the uncut version of the first tape referenced EC001. I captured the whole tape using automatic scene detection and named the files EC_TP1_A, EC_TP1_B ... changing the last letter each time a blank tape section error was detected. Despite not having rewound the tape at any time during the shooting stage I still got the blank tape section errors about 5 times.

I purposely watched 30 minutes of the first tape without touching any settings to determine whether this will help me during the first scene selection, tomorrow. The rest of the 30 minutes where extracted while I was taking a long coffee break.

The total size of the first 1 hour tape 13.1GB of .avi files.

Out of the 160GB hard disk I purchased for the Tanzania video, I've remained with a very fragmented 131GB. I defragmented the hardisk using the standard Microsoft tool that comes with XP overnight.

In the following weeks I'll be documenting the Ecuador video editing phases that I'll be working on each night. This is my third travel video and this process is still in experimental stage so if you're looking for professional well proven advice, I don't think this is the best place. This will be like the lab documentation we used to do in Form 1 during the science class.