Queen Mary Slips In

Rather than watch the Superbowl last Sunday, we spent the day at the Golden Gate Bridge time-laps'ing Queen Mary 2's San Francisco arrival. It was my most ambitious time-lapse setup to date, with a crew of three running six cameras. The one minute film is on YouTube...



and also on BrightCove (much better quality)...



We expected a big crowd so we arrived at the bridge at 11AM to get parking spots and good camera locations. By the 3PM expected arrival there were thousands of spectators waiting and we had to vigorously defend our space to keep people from disturbing our camera setups.

I ran the cameras to the west of the bridge, Cynthia ran the ones from the Marin observation overlook, and Kristin was on the bridge.



Bill Owens joined me and shot his own footage of the crowd and the scene. Rosie helped Cynthia with crowd control and Kristin enlisted the aid of a SF couple in defending her bridge perch. We met a bunch of people and have some good stories about all this. Kristin found herself as the arbitrator of another couple's serious disagreement over where they should relieve their bladders.

Our gear included the six cameras, three laptop computers, various tripods and a couple of battery systems with AC inverters. Not shown in the photo was the other support gear - food, drink and chairs.

Video Sites Compared

Which video sharing service should I use? Over the past several months I’ve tried several sites to see which one best meets my needs. I write and sell time-lapse software, so I need a video library to demonstrate what my software can do. Rather than doing advertising I post videos of my work to drive traffic to my site. People like to watch my videos, so I might as well make some money off of that too.

1) For my video library I need good video quality, easy and fast uploading and an attractive and flexible video player.
2) To drive traffic to my site I need a site with a big audience.
3) For extra revenue I need a site with an ad revenue sharing business model.

I haven’t found a site that meets all these requirements, so I use several. Here are my main choices, I've embedded a player for each one for comparison purposes...

BrightCove for my video gallery – Videos are encoded the excellent Flash 8 codec and are available for viewing within a few minutes of uploading. The player looks great, easily hosts a video gallery and has a neat interface for sharing and embedding videos. Titles are grouped into lineups, and lineups are grouped together into a player with tabs for each lineup. This makes for an easy to set up a video gallery or channel to hold multiple videos. Their content management tools are well designed (in contrast to YouTube). BrightCove is well financed (with a $59MM C round announced today), but the site is still in beta. It doesn’t have a big audience and its ad revenue sharing isn’t running yet. Uploaded files must be Flash8 and 480x270 in size with a 512kbps data rate. You can also upload WMV files for sale or rental at 1.4Mbps and 720x480 (I haven’t tried this yet).


YouTube for the high traffic – In less than six months I’ve had over 2.5MM views of my YouTube channel. Despite the poor video quality (Flash 7 codec) it drives a ton of traffic to my site. If they only had revenue sharing, this could have generated a lot of cash. A major downside is YouTube’s error prone interface. I get multiple notifications when a fan posts a comment or video response. Replying to a message or video response can be frustrating because of the system errors. But uploading is quick and easy. Uploads should be mpeg4 (including Divx) at 320x240 with MP3 audio. The file limit is 10 minutes or 100MB.


MetaCafe for extra revenue – I had the good luck to get my first video mentioned in the MetaCafe blog and that translated into some cash (I wish YouTube paid as good). Quality (Flash8) and uploading are good, but they take a couple of hours to approve because of their concern for copyright. One clip of mine got lost in the system took two weeks to get approval. It required a personal email and documentation from me to convince them that my music was royalty free. This is puzzling to me because many of the clips on their site use copyrighted music tracks. My last upload was approved two hours so maybe they have fixed their approval process. When someone plays one of my videos, they can click on my name to see my channel page (and then RSS subscribe). But for some reason my channel can’t be found by searching for my user name. Best upload format is mpeg4, but files can be mpg, mpeg, avi, divx, flv or wmv with a 100MB size limit. Rather than uploading a thumbnail image, you pick one from a number of choices generated by their software. Notice how the player gets it wrong and stretches this 16x9 content to fit a 4x3 aspect ratio...


I’m also uploading to some other sites to hedge my bets…

Zudeo for its 720p HD quality – This is a bittorrent site for the distribution of large video files. It’s one of the only ways to distribute HD quality video at this time. It doesn’t have a large audience and downloading content requires a high geek quotient (you have to download and install a client package), but I figure the audience is a good demographic fit for my GBTimelapse software. I haven’t found a way to create a channel yet and I’m not sure they have one. HD quality file uploads should be WMV at 1280x720 and 4Mbps.


Stage6 for its high quality – It uses the DivX codec at a 640x360 SD resolution so my videos look much better than the other sites, except Zudeo which requires a lengthy download. Uploads take 30 minutes to appear on the site and when selected, Stage6 videos play quickly. The site is still in alpha and has a small audience. My hope is that with the DivX codec and high quality it will catch on.



Revver for extra revenue – I’ve made a few dollars here, but it’s hard to get any traction. They don’t seem to have a very large audience (compared to YouTube). Quality is good, but the approval requires the video be watched by a human which delays the process. Uploaded files can be mp4, mov, mpg, wmv, or avi (including DivX) with a 100MB size limit. They are converted to Flash8 and QuickTime.


Google Video – Just because it’s Google. The web upload doesn’t have a progress bar, just a busy indicator; so it’s not clear what’s happening during an upload. But, the downloadable “Google Video Uploader” client application will batch upload a bunch of files with good progress feedback.


VideoEgg – Good quality, fast upload, and immediately playable. A quick and easy way to embed a video into a web site.


If you think there are better choices, please let me know.