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I found our video camera the other day, ordered a IEEE1394 cable, and decided to try to make some video clips out of some footage I took on a navigational road rally. Right now the compression is pretty shitty and I should be encoding it at a higher resolution. I also decided to sign up for google video, which is pretty cool, although you have to wait for the video to be approved.

Video 1

Video 2

Edit: Video 3 - 14s, 2mb, 640x480. Why the driver should drive and the navigator should navigate. Still doesn't look great stretched out.

Edit 2: Video 4 looks a lot better.

Video 5: Another new video that looks better. For some reason they don't look as good in the google player as they do in MPC.


It's not much, just a quick couple of clips of me driving. I thought about replacing the audio on the second one because there's a little bit of us giggling like jackasses. Oh, and we won beginner class in this rally with a total of 7 points, and got neat trophies.

So far I'm not really trying to do any sort of editing, I'm just pulling out clips and working to find an ideal way to encode them.

I encoded the first one in Premier and it's 5MB, and the second one in Windows movie maker, which is 10mb. They're both 320x240 WMV9, but I was able to mess with the bitrate and audio a bit more in Premier. If anything, I'd say the bigger windows movie maker one looks worse. I'll probably try again at 720x or 640x, possibly lower the framerate, and see how it looks without it being too huge. The fact that the google video player stretches it out to like 800 pixels wide definitely doesn't help either.

I'm trying out some other programs like virtualdubmod, which allows some other formats. I think that having the video in MPEG4 format with MP3 audio gets the videos approved faster, so I'm going to figure out how to do that and see how it works. What I need is another harddrive, though. The two minutes of mini DV footage I pulled off directly was about 800MB. On the first try I got it down to 20mb, but that seems pretty big for 2 minutes. I'd like to have watchable video at about 5mb/min, if that's possible. Maybe XVID or MKV would work better.

Anyone have some better suggestions, or should I just take advantage of the unlimited file size on google video?


As a bonus here is a video of something you can do with soda and mentos and a picture of me and my friend racing bikes:

wheres all the rally footage?

How did you rank/place in the rally?

There's not much footage. I have about an hour of tape, all in the car. Some of it's at night and doesn't look all that great. T

hese are "navigational road rallies" on public roads. Compared to a TSD, you're given times, maps and hints as to where the checkpoints are, as opposed to just average speeds and directions.

We placed 1st in beginner class in that rally. The next one we did we got 2nd in novice, after we screwed up a checkpoint. If we had been even close to on time we would have won easily. I missed the two most recent rallies because my navigator's doing a semester at Catalina, plus my car still needs brakes, tires, and an alignment (I have tires and brake calipers sitting in the hall). My goal for the season was to move up to regular, where they give you a lot less clues. I was going to do the next one in novice, and if we won, move up to regular for the last one or the next one. The next rally is 17 hours from Las Vegas to southern Utah and back.

I played around with the settings and this one is much more watchable: Video 4 (720x480, 2:50, 31mb)

I can't seem to get capture to work in virtualdubmod or premier, so I'm doing the new stuff in Windows Movie Maker still. Now that I have a decent setting for ripping the video it's not bad, but I'd rather try MPEG-4 with mp3 audio.