slo-mo or frame-by-frame on YouTube or Treemo?

[master]

YouTube and Treemo are very useful for those people that don't have their own website to upload video to. However, I find it very difficult to review video if I can't do a frame by frame advance, or at least run the video in slow motion. So far, I haven't figured out how to do that on either of these sites. Does anyone know how to do it, or how to work around that limitation if it is actually not available?

- master

[Tim McMichael]

YouTube and Treemo are very useful for those people that don't have their own website to upload video to. However, I find it very difficult to review video if I can't do a frame by frame advance, or at least run the video in slow motion. So far, I haven't figured out how to do that on either of these sites. Does anyone know how to do it, or how to work around that limitation if it is actually not available?

- master

What I do is capture the video in slow motion. I just hit the slow-mo on the camera while it is being copied to my hard drive. Then I upload it to Treemo in that form.

[master]

What I do is capture the video in slow motion. I just hit the slow-mo on the camera while it is being copied to my hard drive. Then I upload it to Treemo in that form.

Thanks Tim, but what I need help with is viewing in slow motion or frame by frame, video that other people have uploaded that isn't already in slo mo.

- master

[vault3rb0y]

This is also somewhat related to your question, so i figured i would just ask it here-

Generally how big are the videos you guys are uploading? An 8 second clip on our video camera translates into 73mb when i try to upload it. Has anyone had any success with either a different format, or way of converting from a tape to a file, that keeps the mb's down? Ive downloaded movies from other people only 2 mb long for 30 seconds or so, and i cant figure it out. Im converting using sony video file converter software. Thanks for any tips!

[master]

vault3rb0y - file size is a multi-faceted issue. The file size as recorded first depends on what image size (640x480, 480x360, 320x240) and frame rate (30 or 15 frames per second) is used during the recording. Second it can depend on whether you are moving the camera or the camera is stationary. This aspect is not often understood. A camera can have some built in compression algorithms and a common one is to compare one frame to the next and only store image data about what has changed between frames. So that is how a fixed position (read on a tripod) camera with a vaulter moving through the frame can be smaller than a the same time-length video where the camera is moving following the vaulter. So those are the key elements of file size as video taped (or recorded onto a memory card). Lets call this raw video. It is usually a ".avi" file type.

I almost forgot one of the most obvious ways to reduce file size and unfortunately, many people don't take advantage of it. That is to trim the beginning and the end of your files. For instance, once my but hits the pit, everything that follows is of no interest to me. In fact, except for wanting to know where in the pit I landed, I could trim the video once my hands have cleared the bar. And on the beginning, ask yourself what are you going to try to learn from the video. Be sure to include the approach run if you want to study that, but you don't need any of the idiosyncrasies we sometimes put at the start of our approach. In my experience, most vaults, including the run, can be trimmed to about 7 seconds worth of video.

Several programs can do image resizing and file compression and file type conversion. Windows Media Encoder is a free program from Microsoft. It creates ".wmv" type files that are played by Windows Media Player, also free. Apple has a program QuickTime which most of us have used to play ".mov" files. These files can be created by several programs but Apple sells QuickTime Pro for only $30 and it can do many nice things along with the basic image size change and file size compression.

Finally I will answer your question. I took a video of one of my jumps that was recorded at 640x480 at 30fps. At these settings, the raw file (.avi) is 2MB per second of video. I was able to trim the file to 7 seconds which includes my entire run and landing in the pit. I used QuickTime Pro to process it at full size and medium quality into a .mov file. I also made it into two other sizes. The results for the 7 second movie are shown below:
640x480 raw is 14MB
640x480 .mov is 2.6MB
480x360 .mov is 1.5MB
320x240 .mov is .8MB

- master

[vault3rb0y]

Wow that explains a lot!! One more thing, ive heard of people taking the sound out of the file, does that help or is it really unimportant? I will get on trying to find a converter right away, thanks a lot for that!

[Siros]

To me, I don't really think it's that important. Extra sounds may distract you from viewing the true purpose of the video.

[rainbowgirl28]

I'll talk to the guys at Treemo and see what the complications are with doing frame by frame. I would guess it has something to do with the format they are when they are online (I believe it is Flash).

[master]

Wow that explains a lot!! One more thing, ive heard of people taking the sound out of the file, does that help or is it really unimportant? I will get on trying to find a converter right away, thanks a lot for that!

I thought eliminating sound would reduce file size considerably, but in my test case the difference was only minor. Although I don't think the sound on the version with sound was any great quality to begin with.

640x480 with sound = 2.615MB
640x480 w/o sound = 2.600MB

- master

[Tim McMichael]

I was hunting through shareware programs looking for a converter and saw an ad for software that converts youtube video. This must mean that there is a way to capture it to a hard drive. I know next to nothing about this stuff, but I am guessing that as popular as youtube is, someone must have written software that lets you capture it. Once it's on the hard drive, I suppose it can be manipulated from there.

[master]

I was hunting through shareware programs looking for a converter and saw an ad for software that converts youtube video. This must mean that there is a way to capture it to a hard drive. I know next to nothing about this stuff, but I am guessing that, as popular as youtube is, someone must have written software that lets you capture it. Once its on the hard drive, I suppose it can be manipulated from there.

You are correct Tim. I have experimented with that exact approach to my problem. In fact, I first looked into that in order to capture one of your first videos so I could study it better.

It does work, although there is sometimes image quality degradation. But more significantly it does take more time than just being able to view the video the way frame by frame from the source. So unless I want to keep a copy of the video for my collection, I'm less apt to view and provide feedback to people if it takes much more work.

- master