What Movie Quality Do You Shoot For Uploading Videos To The Forum

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
1

Earlier this year I uploaded some video to YouTube, for posting here, that I shot with my Canon G12. The videos, with sound, were about some loco conversions to DCC and the results. Each video was 1-2 minutes long, shot as HD, but took 45-60 minutes to upload. Two questions:

  1. Would shooting in Standard mode (480x640 or whatever) result in a much faster upload and still be fine for viewing here? There’s a 3rd lower resolution mode on the camera but the manual says it’s “coarse” in granularity, so not good enough?

  2. I was able to post YouTube links that were useable here. But I note that (in WPF) some folks post a video photo that can simply be clicked so it goes, kinda like a photobucket photo is “there”. How do I do that?

Thanks for any advice.

2

I shot my video at 640 by 480 because my camera skipped frames at higher resolutions. I uploaded to YouTube, and then inserted the video in my post using the “insert video” icon in this editor (icon looks like a snippit of 35 mm film with a “play” arrow inside it).

3

If you edit your video you can export it as a .flv or .mp4 to upload.

These type files are compressed and the file size is a lot smaller and you can keep the HD resolution.

If not you might want to convert it before uploading it. Youtube is going to compress it anyway.

4

I want to see how to do that so will try. Do I just paste the webpage into the first “Source” block or have to fill in the other three items??

That seems to work. Thanks! I’ll next try a new video captured in Standard video and see how that may shorten upoad time.

5

The videos off my camera come off as MPG format; I run them through MS Movie Maker and save them in that format, reducing the file size by at least 50%. My old camera does not do HI Def, so your files should be subatantually reduced by converting to standard format and a compressed file format like Movie Maker

6

My Canon turns out HD movies in .mov format. That is one of the formats uploadable to YouTube directly.

In playing again with Movie Maker I got past my confusion on saving files and options. When choosing File / Save As the only format seems to be Movie maker Project File .wlmp format. This format seems to allow later editing. But I finally noticed the File / Save movie option, which provides lots of saving / conversion options. So I learned how to save as MPEG-4 (as its suggested option) for YouTube. That reduced the upload time to YouTube by about half. Next I need to try a Standard resolution with the camera to see how much that additionally reduces file size & upload time. I presume Standard definition will be more than adequate for computer viewing. I also guess that audio quality captured by the Canon is the same for Standard and HD shooting, but not sure.

7

Standard is a smaller frame size and will be a smaller file if you compress (save as .flv or mp4)Uncompressed it will still be big. No computer files are bigger than uncompressed video files. However computers are getting faster and people are always demanding higher quality video. I already have heard that a lot of kids won’t watch anything on youtube that isn’t at least 720. HD is going out of style soon and 4K will be the new black. My screen res is 1920x1080. Standard def is 640x480, less than 1/4 of my screen. Why go backwards?