A Note on Videos

So apparently PicasaWeb is bad for videos.

Very bad.


See update for details.

I didn't verify the green bean video upload last night, and checking it out today, I've found that the audio is very choppy. Apparently this is a known issue when uploading higher quality video.

A search of the Google forums suggests that the solution is YouTube (way to go Google!), and I'm going to do what anyone with really cute twins would do and upload all the videos there. This makes sense in a lot of ways as YouTube is designed to handle big HD files like I'm producing and is also much much more easily accessible from mobile devices. We've wanted to show videos several times on phones and haven't been able to get Picasa to work so this will take care of that.

I've just started the upload process of the 4 videos currently on the website and hope it will finish overnight. Once they are up, you can access them via the channel I've set up at the following URL:

http://www.youtube.com/user/sooner1997

We will also create a link specifically to go to video from the front-page of the blog.

All the photos will still live at the PicasaWeb site as it is by far the best I've used for photo purposes. So follow the above link sometime in the morning and see what is to be seen in video land. I've made the vids public for the moment, but we will see how that goes.

Thanks for your patience.

UPDATE:
Everything should be up and running on YouTube now. Some of you may have tried the green bean video this morning and discovered that it was still choppy. Turns out the issue wasn't really with PicasaWeb (as YouTube and PicasaWeb are both owned by Google and appear to use the same rendering engine) but with the way Google deals with the uploads of AVCHD files and certain settings in those files. Essentially, the file was being doubled in length and the audio was being chopped up to try to fit. Seems to be an issue with 60fps video. This issues has been going on for nearly two years and appears to be random. I changed formats and made a couple of other adjustments and all should be good now.

With this new info, I could probably still use PicasaWeb for the videos now that I have a handle on the issues, but I think the benefits of YouTube for accessibility are still there. Perhaps I will maintain both.

In fact, I just uploaded the new version of the video to PicasaWeb and it works great.

Don't forget that it's possible to subscribe to the blog, to the YouTube channel and to PicasaWeb so you will be notified of any updates or changes.