In preparation for the Bonaire coverage next week, I’ve purchased a Flip Ultra for talking head interviews, and also have come up with a Compressor droplet for easy conversion of 720p video into a format Kyte.tv likes. Uploading 16:9 video results in a squished look as Kyte crams it into a 3:2 aspect ratio. I like using the Sanyo HD700, and will likely bring that as well (although I won’t be using it much because I don’t want to do too much transcoding).

I had a hard time coming up with video settings for upload. For example, exporting in Quicktime using H.264 and selecting the letterbox option worked fine. But exporting Quicktime/H.264 using Compressor resulted in a Kyte movie that was missing the video part. Finally, I settled on MP4 at 640×432 (multiples of 16, as Victor A. advised me) and a padding on the top and bottom to letterbox the output video. This seems to work fine, and the resulting Kyte video looks pretty good.

UPDATE: Jason from Kyte tells me that FLV with bitrate less than 700k means that they will not transcode the video. This is great information! Jason also tells me that the optimal resolution is 424×318.