I've been fiddling with video editing lately and have learned a few things
with much yet to learn.
My objective is to be able to root around in ride videos from my gopro
for a few seconds here or a few seconds there of something interesting
and then post it to youtube so I can include it in a ride post.
It sounds easy, but seems hard.
My gopro shoots video in OK quality, and it is easy to pull out a clip
from time-index-a to time-index-b that retains full quality.
When you upload a video to youtube, they re-encode (transcode)
the video into numerous different versions (from lowest quality
to highest quality). A lower quality one has a smaller file size than
a higher quality one, so when someone views a video, youtube detects
the speed of their Internet connection and shows them a version that
might download to them in a reasonable amount of time. Youtube
provides a little "gear wheel" at the bottom of the screen so that
you can choose any of the available qualities, even if it means
you have to wait a long time for it to download.
I've been trying to figure out how to prepare my videos so that,
at least at the highest quality, the video is still worth looking at,
and that's what I perceive to be the hard part.
It turns out that it is pretty easy to shoot a "static video" - some
talking head standing in front of a bland background - and upload
that to youtube... even after they transcode it, all the versions look
pretty good.
It is a lot harder to shoot a video from a motorcycle moving in and
out of the shade through a canopy of trees where the background
is constantly changing, and retain the quality through the
transcoding.
Transcoding involves a bunch of mathematical compression algorithms
with respect to the difference between one frame and the next. When
there's not much difference, the compression works out great. When
there's a lot of difference between adjacent frames, the compression
shows up in the finished product as a lack of resolution.
Here's a good example:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gn1hy2t2BpcThis is us turning onto Yellow Creek Road a couple of weeks ago at
the Fall Color Ride. If you click on it, and use the gear wheel to select
1080p (the highest quality) you can see that when we are out in the
open the quality is pretty good, and when we are zooming through
the tree canopy, the quality is reduced.
The quality of the whole video is good when I'm looking at what was
outputted from my gopro.
When you look at professional videos on youtube, at the highest quality
level, such as this Yamaha Niken video we've been talking about on
some threads here, it is all good:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERpQ6_NQGPMPart of the reason it is all good is because the professional videographer
avoided hard-to-compress shots (like zooming through the tree canopy)
on purpose. There's lots of zooming down curvy roads going on in this
video, but it is all done in places where the background is not complex,
and the colors are few and the lighting doesn't change much.
I think that one thing that will help my videos will be to figure out
more about reducing the frame-rate without getting the audio
out-of-sync, and perhaps which video and audio codices to use...
So... do you know of any (short hopefully) motorcycle videos on youtube
that are high quality through the whole video, and which involve
complex backgrounds? You could post links to them on this thread...
-Mike
