Saturday, September 11, 2004
Camera
My new Canon PowerShot S1 IS Digital Camera (Cost: $335).
Video compression
I realise the movie mode on my Powershot is little more than a toy, but I've taken a couple of clips that have gone down well. Only when a friend asked me to send him one of the files over MSN Messenger did I notice the huge size of the video files: a 150s movie as 320x200 is 37 MB! So, a tip for anyone taking videos: use the free Virtualdub tool to transcode to a better codec. My 37MB file recompressed to 7MB. Or just use the Windows Movie Maker and save it as a movie.wmv file.
For *nix users: The codec mjpeg, is just a series of pictures (15fps or something) and needs to be converted. For unix flavours you can convert the encoding by using FFMPEG or mencoder (part of mplayer)
Some Reviews: 1, 2
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