Below is about 55 minutes of tiger shark video clips from the Bahamas. It is partitioned into 5-minute chunks, which you can view via the “Scenes” interface. Alternatively, you can download the entire video, but it’s 650MB. (read more »)

I wandered down the road yesterday and set up a camera and tripod to take time-lapse videos of clouds. The clouds here in Yap are incredible, and every time I see a particularly voluminous one, I think of time-lapse. Unfortunately, the big ones are often way off on the horizon and would require a really long lens and heavy tripod to do properly, but I still managed to shoot some interesting proofs of concept. I want to shoot a really long cloud time-lapse as a background video I can play in the framed 46″ LCD on my wall.

Read on for another video. (read more »)

A sixgill shark in Seattle

First, a bit of history: Marty Snyderman introduced me to Travis Swanson at DEMA last year and told me that Travis was the “Jim Abernethy of the Pacific Northwest.” Howard Hall and Marty had been out with Hydrus earlier come back with fantastic images and video footage of sixgill sharks (Hexanchus griseus) in relatively shallow water. Sixgill sharks are a deep-water shark species rarely seen by recreational SCUBA divers, and I was really intrigued by the possibility of seeing one. Marty’s introduction prompted me to immediately book an exploratory trip with Travis and [Team Hydrus][teamhydrus]. I invited Douglas Seifert (contributing editor, Dive Magazine) and Simon Rogerson (editor, Dive Magazine) along for the trip; I travel with Douglas frequently, but it had been years since I had seen Simon. (read more »)

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Every video person should see this clip of a new technology in the works by some folks at the University of Washington.

When this technology becomes mainstream, it is going to change everything.

I’ve started uploading little video clips to ECHENG.COM. It’s about time my website had more video content! (read more »)

I can’t imagine the amount of work that went into this video, which was done by an Italian artist named BLU. It’s around 7 minutes long, and is worth every second of the time it takes to watch it. (via gizmodo)

Does anyone know how to stream Xvid mpeg4 AVIs to a Playstation 3 using suitable media streaming software on Mac OS X?

My ReadyNas box supports uPNP media streaming out of the box, which seems to work well for formats officially supported by the PS3. The only problem with the ReadyNas’s implementation of uPNP is that it does a full volume scan of whatever I’ve shared once every 24 hours. If I add a new file and want to stream it immediately, I have to go into the admin interface and kick off a manual re-scan, which can take a long, long time.

So now, I’ve switched to using Nullriver’s MediaLink, which is installed on a Mac Mini that I use as a backup server. The Mac Mini has the media volume on the NAS box mounted, and MediaLink shares that volume out to the PS3. So far, it has worked perfectly, except that video and formats not officially supported by the PS3 still don’t work.

The PS3 doesn’t support AVIs (or AAC audio files, for that matter), so the ideal media server needs to support realtime transcoding. The only product I’ve read about that seems to do that is Nero 8’s MediaHome, which is Windows only. MediaHome claims to do real-time transcodes to the following formats:

Audio: MP3 (MPEG-1 Layer 3), AAC (Nero Digital), HE-AAC (Nero Digital) Video: MPEG-1, MPEG-2, Nero Digital (MPEG-4)

This seems ideal! My AAC audio would be transcoded on-the-fly to MP3, and all my unsupported video files would be transcoded on-the-fly to MPEG-4. Music isn’t such a big deal because I’ll stream music to the system using an Airport Express, but being able to play more video formats through the PS3 would be nice.

If I can’t find a solution for the Mac, I may just take one of my extra Windows boxes and use it as a streaming media server.

Here’s where the Mac people in my life come on and say, “But Quicktime and MP4 are the only way to go! You shouldn’t NEED to deal with AVIs, ever!” I’ll preemptively respond to your comments by saying that you are not living in the real world. Or maybe you’re too old to realize how the new generation actually gets their media. ;)

Let the updates begin!

I’ve been fighting with the ultra-slow data pipe from here to server land, but it seems to be OK at night, once everyone is sleeping…

Jason and John over on the Kyte team have been really helpful over e-mail; I’ve figured out how to produce great video on Kyte.

At the moment, they tell me that optimal resolution is 424×318 pixels. Also, a Flash (FLV) video encoded at less than 700kbps will not be re-encoded by Kyte.

Here are two examples of the same video hosted as a show on Kyte (read more »)

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.

I spent half of Sunday helping Adam and Rae film the largest scene in their upcoming documentary on Qui Jin.

Li Jing flies above the Women’s Army (photo: Adam Tow)

Although my allergies made it a painful few hours, I enjoyed manning the second camera at Tilden Park and taking stills of the production. 34 extras put up with bitterly-cold wind, filling out the “army” and learning martial arts moves for the training session scene. It was fun to meet Li Jing; she was really funny.

Flickr is now allowing the uploading of videos. The video quality is really good, but they limit your videos to 90 seconds (a mistake, I think). In any case, I just just found a replacement for Veoh for videos under 90 seconds! YouTube’s video quality is subpar when compared to Flickr’s, and YouTube’s community is terrible (for comments, I mean).

Check out the video in fullscreen. It’s not bad. It also isn’t obvious how to break out of fullscreen mode if you don’t read the instructions :) (hit ESC to return).

I’ve posted a teaser video from the Shark Angels project. (read more »)

Norb let me try out his Panasonic HVX200. I didn’t really know what I was doing and set it to record 720/60P instead of setting it for 720/24P overcranked to 60 fps, so I had to use Motion to re-time the footage (which may not have been necessary). (read more »)

This is quite random. I was watching the behind the scenes video of Paul Steward’s experience in Tari (Papua New Guinea), capturing video footage of birds of paradise for BBC’s Planet Earth. I met and befriended him while we were both there.

Anyway, in the footage, they show Huli men dancing, which reminded me that I have a bunch of (crappy) video from Mt. Hagen and Tari taken with my old point & shoot camera (mostly shot to capture an audio track).

So here’s one of the videos. It’s footage of the Chimbu’s dead child “dance”, which they performed continuously at the Mt. Hagen Cultural Festival. (read more »)

I played a lot with infrared time-lapse during the trip to Tanzania. Here’s a sample video of dramatic clouds (in near-infrared) rolling in over the plains of the Serengeti. (read more »)

the new iMovie

I saw the prototype of this app last year while on a dive trip with the “video engineer” at Apple that Steve Jobs referred to in the announcement (signed a NDA). I was really excited about it back then, and am glad to see that it made a major product!

I frequently whip up short videos using iMovie, and hope that the new version doesn’t have a generic “H.264″ project setting that automatically crappifies all incoming video from small compact still cameras. There is no way to get good video quality in the prior versions because the video gets transcoded so poorly on the way in.

Dearest Lazyweb and Final Cut Pro / Compressor gurus — I have a question for you. Let’s say I have a bunch of clips in a timeline. Is there any way to automatically overlay text from metadata values onto a video clip? Let’s say I want to embed:

1. a copyright overlay
2. the clip name
3. the timecode

What would be ideal is to be able to overlay the text onto each clip and render out special, watermarked versions for layout in a timeline. This must be a standard thing — I’ve seen it done. I’m just not sure how to do it. :)

Right now, I am doing #1 and #2 by hand, and it’s … tiresome. I have no idea how to do #3, and some some old(er) film types tell me that they use some sort of hardware box to do it. That seems lame.

Just over a year ago, I posted the results of my first time with a video camera underwater. While in the Bahamas, I took footage of tiger sharks, great hammerhead sharks, lemon sharks, bull sharks, oceanic blacktip sharks, and Caribbean reef sharks.

I gave a talk on big animals at the 53rd Boston Sea Rovers Clinic last month, which became the perfect excuse to edit down all of that video footage into a 2:25 montage. Enjoy! :)

Tony Wu has posted a short video of some of our whale encounters last week. Video footage was taken by both Tony and his wife, Emiko, using a Sony HC3 in a Seatool housing.