Discussion: Uploading headcam videos to Vimeo

Any tips what is the best way to do if we think about one hour SD videos. There is so many options, it is difficult to try them all. Codec h.264 or something else? Frame rate, 30? Bitrate for SD video? Should it be pre-scaled to 640 x something or is it better have better resolution and let Vimeo do the down scaling? Best way to compress audio - sound quality isn't that important but it's nice to have something. Thanks!

Has anyone ever used one of those frame-aligning algorithms to take out the "head shake" of these videos post production? Just curious to see if anyone has tried them. I can't watch these vids as-is.

Like this. Headcam in the forest is somewhat more jittery.

Vimeo has some guidelines for this. I have to go lower on bitrate in order to get an hour smaller than 500MB. I haven't tried, but I obviously letting Vimeo downscale for you will make the upload take a lot longer. if you go too high on bitrate, they seem to recompress it away anyways. I have been using h264 640x480 30fps. 3000kbits/s is fine for youtube, but more like 1000 for 1hr vimeo. I just do 2-pass with a target size of 470MB (save room for audio). AAC is good, but I have been using MP3 since AviDemux has some settings I can use to lower the audio quality/size a lot.

deshaker looks interesting. the "before" half of the demo eddie links to (watch it fullscreen) seems way worse than the o-headcam videos I've seen.

You can compare headcam video and headcam video+youtube's stablizer:

http://youtu.be/iWwG_t2MSyI

http://youtu.be/IAq7-F7EnGE

Those deshakers/stabilizers does work well if there is no much (barrel) distortion. Often these head cams with wide angle has lots of distortion and that may make stabilized videos look a bit strange. I haven't tried them yet, I have had other things to play with. I guess at some point I need to try that approach too. I just wouldn't want to do any hand editing, needs to part of the automatic script.

Yestardays video: http://vimeo.com/23141652
h264, 30fps, 640x368, bitrate 1.2M, audio mp3 mono 32kb/s (I couldn't get ffmpeg mp3 audio go any lower).

Vimeo seems to always re-decompress my videos, no matter how well I have compressed them. And quality gets worse. So I need to upload unnecessarily big files (less compressed) to get decent quality out from the player. Part of Vimeo's business strategy I guess, makes upload limit look better than it is in practice.

Just this weekend I noticed the 15 minute limit has been lifted on my youtube account. they don't actually say, but it seems like there is an automatic trigger for this based on number and age of non-infringing uploads, especially given that they warn you might lose this ability if you delete old videos.

I used the deshaker plugin for this video (will be available soon):
http://vimeo.com/23380940

Yes, I think I like the black edges better than the fill with next/previous frame (as in this older version from Jagge's log). This new one also looks a little sharper - perhaps the old version was just magnified (i.e. resampled) a bit?

The black border gives the feel of watching through a helmet facemask. Like I'm the Black Knight in a Monty Python sketch :) My eye has an easier time of ignoring the black edges than the sliding distortions of the filled-in version. I can focus on particular objects in the new version for seconds at a time. This gives me a chance to glance over at the map and then back again. It was much harder before.

In the old version I kept looking for the flags when you punched, thinking I had just missed them, but now I can see that there are no flags. :)

One last test might be to try stopping down the field of view after deshaking to limit the amount of black edge motion that can be seen. You'll lose some information but also reduce the level of distraction. Maybe just a 10-20% stop-down might be enough, even if there is still some black edge. I cut a mask from a piece of paper and taped it on the screen. Maybe some combination of masking and edge filling?

wowwww

This is cool. I like how the bouncing frame gives you a feel for the running. I'd guess that the stabilization helps video compression too.

Right, it should help compression. But those black borders may have a lot bigger effect on compression, plain black compresses well.

Here is similar one from last Saturday's race. Those who will run Jukola may find it interesting, the area is next to Jukola 2011 terrain. Should be quite similar, this is also now officially Jukola training map.

http://vimeo.com/23576927

For this I made 834x480 video, Vimeo re-sized it to 640xsomething. I tried first with two small videos with different resolution and to me it looked like letting Vimeo do some down scaling will not affect quality much at all. This has the advantage of having better resolution video available for download (for a week or something). If you log in you should be able to download the original video with better quality and resolution to be watched locally.

I don't have the 15 min limit any more either. What it comes to long 40+ minute one I get a lot better quality at Youtube than at Vimeo. Here is yesterday's run, I'd say huge video quality improvement compared to my vimeo videos.
http://www.youtube.com/user/XCJagge#p/f/0/lABRDiBS...

I'll post my videos to Youtue fom now on, link is http://www.youtube.com/user/XCJagge just if somebody likes to follow.

Jagge, what camera are you using?

It's a MD-80 clone with additional wide angle lens and external battery pack (reduces bouncing and gives more runtime). Photo There is several clones, I have no idea what version this is.