Canon S5 IS. It’s pretty good at recording video clips of up to 1 hour long (or 4 GB filesize of a single .avi file)… :)

No problems:) Actually, in the video (in this video, at least), I think that most important is sound. And I think that the sound is very good. You can see Jimmy Wales speak very clearly, questions & answers are also very clear. I am no professional photographer (or cameraman;-) so what I tried to achieve is simply to record Jimbo’s presentation…

Could I record it better? Maybe yes. But with this un-professional digital camera? Maybe not… So I’m fine with the results… :)

nice work, I hope you learned video encoding and video final cut are two steps in the video editing process. kind of different from photographing =)) not because one ought to have a tripod, but cos film is sound and composition plus plus. The human psych is wired in a certain way (a truth lost to several generations BG film makers) so we get distructed from noise, figure in the middle rather then left/right, lack of story line and shaky hands.

I gave up after 4 min. sorry. good intentions go together with certain training.
Better luck next time though !!!

I personally prefer either Adobe Flash CS3 or CS4 encoder… You simply drag-and-drop inside your video files, then select quality of video, audio, etc., and then start the process of encoding. After a few minutes (or hours — depends on quality of encoding and length of video), videos are transformed into .flv (or .f4v) format, and that’s it. Then you have only to embed them in your website — JW FLV player does a great job! :)

Adobe Flash CS4 Media Encoder is maybe the best choice, as you can encode the videoclips in the newer (and better) .f4v file format. There are a lot of options, and you can specify any quality for video & audio separately.

I’ve used 1.3-1.8 Mbps for the video (dual pass) and AAC2 128 kbps for the audio. You can see that the quality is quite good at this level of compression…

Finally, just one more note — probably, there are a lot of free alternative to Adobe’s Media Encoder, but you should search for them yourself… I had Media Encoder CS4 handy, so I’ve chosen it for ease of use and for the quality it provides… :)

Thanks for the lecture; I am watching it atm and it is quite cool.

I am actually writing to ask for your help, since you seem very helpful. Can you send to me or write here several short steps on how to encode recorded video clips, so as to make them good for uploading with reasonable sound (picture too but less important) quality?

Cheers!

I do not know much about Jimbo Wales — actually, this was the first time when I was able to see him talk! :-)

Maybe he’s a controversial person, but I can’t deny that he has certain magnetism and makes the impression of a sincere, passionate man… Maybe I’m wrong, who knows, but that was my personal impression…

You’re welcome! :-)

I promised to put the videos online a long time ago, but encoding + uploading them took quite a while… Only the encoding part took more than 6 hours on a P4 HT @ 3.4 GHz, and I even had to restart the process once… :)