Digital Home Thoughts - News & Reviews for the Digital Home

A mere 15 days after I uploaded my first wide-screen video and asked YouTube to release a 16:9 aspect ratio player, they implemented it. Am I good or what? For my next feat, I'll be asking for 10,000 shares of Google stock for $1. ;-) OK, back to reality: YouTube has obviously been working on this for a while now, and it's nice to see tha they finally implemented it. Unfortunately they're not doing smart detection of the content - meaning the 99.9% of all the videos on YouTube that are in 4:3 aspect ratio will be displayed with big black bars on the right and left. Worse still, if you hard-rendered a 16:9 video to fit in 4:3 like I did with two of my videos, you end up with big black bars on the top, bottom, left, and right. Yuck! Still, at least all the 16:9 videos I'm shooting are much bigger on the YouTube page. It's great to see YouTube making this change. It still pales in quality to what I'm seeing with Motionbox, but there are some quality hacks out there that can improve the quality.

My headache now is trying to figure out the best video deployment strategy - I use the incredibly awesome TubeMogul to distribute my videos to 11 different video sharing sites at once, but many of them have 100 MB limits on the upload, so I might have to start uploading two different versions of my video - three if you count the one I upload to Motionbox. Talk about a headache...the things I do to bring you guys awesome quality videos! ;-)

"Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Vincent Laforet got his hands on a Canon 5D MkII for a weekend. Rather than shoot some quick stills, he rounded up an entire film crew and put them to work using the amazing 1080p video capture it offers - in helicopters, no less! When SmugMug heard about this, we went bananas and offered to host both the short film itself, Reverie, as well as the Behind the Scenes footage."

Seeing is believing, so the best thing I can say is to watch the video: there's a Quicktime version of the video over on Canon's site, or there's the h.264 Flash-based version on Smugmug. They both look great! Vincent Laforet's blog has a bunch of info about the video, how hit was shot, etc. I really have to hand it to Canon, they've created a whole new generation of DSLRs with shockingly impressive video capabilities. I want to see this type of technology trickle down to Canon's point and shoot line - it's ridiculous that the best Canon has done with their small cameras is 640 x 480 resolution video, though with one camera they've finally moved to h.264. I wouldn't expect the same quality of video on a small $400 point and shoot camera, but at the very least I hope Canon gives us h.264 720p video (and no, the TX1 doesn't count).

In this corner, we have a $999 USD Nikon D90, and in the other corner we have a $5200 USD Panasonic HVX200. This head to head video test has some surprising results...check it out! You'll need to jump over to Vimeo to watch it in HD though, which is of course the entire point. ;-)

D90 and HVX side-by-side test from Chronicle Project on Vimeo