Farm Report: two chicks in a screen test

Here is my first video for the Farm Report. It's the two chicks I photographed in earlier reports. They're juveniles now, not as cute as little baby chicks.


This video is just a test really, to try out my new Canon ZR800 camcorder, and to see what was involved with uploading it on-line, and how it could be done. It was not as easy as I had imagined; there are various decisions to be made in the process.

For instance, this video I've uploaded. It's in the format of a .wmv file, and the size is 22.3 MB. It plays for about 1 and 1/2 minutes. It took 2o minutes to upload it to my blog.

The best copy of the video is in digital format. But this same video as a Digital Video file is 373 MB. That would take over 5 hours to upload, even with my broadband connection! The image quality is much better as a DV file, but 5 hours is a lot of time for such a short video. A longer DV video could take days at that rate.

There is also the question of widescreen vs standard square screen. My new camera does widescreen, and it's beautiful. However, my video editing software (ArcSoft's ShowBiz DVD 2) will only save my widescreen footage in widescreen format as a DV file. If I save it in another format, it gets scrunched up in a square screen, making everything look tall and thin.

This video clip I've published was the highest resolution I could get in the .wmv format. I could have made the file smaller in terms of megabytes, but the quality would suffer. Yet I don't want to spend DAYS uploading video files either.

I said I have broadband at home, but it's via satellite dish, and I think uploads are only done at 128 kbps. I may have better luck uploading it at work in town, where we have DSL.

And I have yet to try uploading videos to video hosting sites like Youtube.com and Vimeo.com. There is still lots to learn. It's not hard to learn, it's just new. And like all new things, it just gets easier as you know more. I'm looking forward to doing some fun things with video and the internet.