Cheap HD vimeo solution?

[adessmith]

This might be a stupid question, and it's probably way out of the scope of our church right now, but I figured I'd throw it out there.

Our church has been doing a little live streaming on ustream, and I wasnt satisfied with ustream's archiving system. Some times our DSL connection drops and the recording is split into 2 sections. There isnt much you can do in the way of editing, etc...

I decided to give vimeo a try, I've been experimenting with it today, and it seems like it will make a better replacement for our arcived online services.
I'm running an older camcorder into a video input card to capture video (and taking sound off the sound board) to edit and upload later.

I noticed vimeo has exceptional support for HD video. If we wanted to look at getting an HD source into the computer, what are some of the cheaper options out there? I mean, is this something that could be resonably done with some basic consumer equipment for a couple hundred dollars or less? I know there are some cheap HD flash recorders out there, but Im not sure if they allow capturing through them straight to a computer. I'd rather capture my audio off the board and my video at the same time, instead of trying to sync them up later.

Maybe I shouldnt bother. I mean, if I get a very high quality SD capture and upload it to vimeo's service, it's probably going to look so much better than our ustream webcam that we wont care if it is HD or not...

[JeffReckart]

Have you tried using Flash Media Encoder with Ustream? The FME will do the encoding locally and bounce the stream to Ustream, who will then broadcast it on the Internet. Using FME will also allow you to save a copy of the broadcast locally on your hardrive, so the DSL connection wouldn't be an issue!

JeffReckart

[adessmith]

Yeah, we tried FME... the capture card is an MPEG-2 Hardware encoder, so it isnt compatible with ustream or FME. I've got a decent little webcam setup for ustream, which works fine, but the quality isnt that great, and its pretty much stationary. There are some pan-tilt-zoom functions for the webcam, but it is just digital zoom and goes all grainy... We are planning on still running ustream with the webcam just for a simple live setup, but we want to have the ability to do some editing on the archived recordings.

I also dont like the fact that you cant re-upload an edited video to ustream...
For instance, last week I didnt have anyone running the video, so I had to start it myself early (I am also a guitarist in the band) and then we were running late getting started, so there is 10 minutes at the beginning of the video of people conversing. Then I forgot to cut it off, so there was an additional 10-15 minutes at the end.
I never could get the editor in ustream to "perminately" chop the video. It seemed like it would just alter the "start and end" times, but wasnt reflected in the embeded version. If you drag the slider you can skip past the "end time" on playback. I was able to download the FLV file from ustream and trim it up, but I couldnt find any way to get the new version back up on ustream.

Additionally, there have been a few of the overlay advertisements on the videos which were "of questionable taste" for a church broadcast. Nothing bad, but we dont need to advertise weight loss supliments or anything like that...
We dont have that many live viewers, most watch the service later. If we can provide the video to most of our viewers (the archived version) without the advertisements for just $60 per year... that's the way to go. I dont think we could do watershed (paid version of ustream) for anywhere near that price.

If we were to use FME and edit the video, we would have to have somewhere to upload the video. I never found a way to "re-upload" a video on ustream without re-broadcasting it. Our website has very limited monthly bandwidth (It's a really cheap plan). We have never come close to hitting it, but I've never hosted videos or anything from our web space. I would prefer to keep the videos hosted through a dedicated service like vimeo.

Basically, ustream is primarily a "live service" and the ability to archive videos is a nice added bonus. We really need a dedicated service for archived videos... ustream just doesnt provide enough flexibility for offline user created content. Still, nothing beats ustream when it comes to the ease of getting live video online, so we are going to continue to use it in that respect.

[petereit]

For what it's worth, we're using Vimeo to archive our HD sermons and so far it's working very well for us. We went ahead and spent the $59 for Vimeo+ to bump the 500MB per-video upload limit up to 1GB.

I had to play around with the settings in Compressor to figure out how to get an hour of 720p video from 8GB to just under the 1GB cap. Using the H.264 preset, I ended up dropping the frame size to 50% (640 x 360) and setting the bandwidth to 1250.

For shorter sermons, I just increase the bandwidth setting and try to keep the end product around 950MB.

[adessmith]

I abandoned the idea of an HD solution.
For now, I just want to get a good quality SD solution worked out.

Here is the solution I have come up with; we are going to test this tomorrow...

Video signal starts at a camcorder we have setup on a tripod. We run composite out of the camcorder to the sound booth where it is split and enters a DVD recorder, and a PC.
Service is recorded on DVD, and streamed to either ustream or livestream. (we are thinking about moving from ustream)
I make the required number of copies of the DVD and take one home to rip, edit if necessary, and upload to vimeo.

The audio solution:
A recording output from our house console is run into a seperate submixer we use for recording. With this mixer we also add in a touch of ambient sound from a boundary mic mounted to the ceiling. The opperator of the recording console wears a set of headphones to monitor the balance of the house and ambient sounds. The L/R audio from this submixer is then run into the dvd recorder and the line-in on the PC.


So far, this has worked great for us.
However, we have been running only to the PC and done our streaming and recording through ustream which caused problems if our connection ever dropped (this has happened a couple of times)
Also, by using ustream, we have had very limited editing capibilities and limited quality. I tried FME but we keep having problems with it, and it was too many steps to jump through for our A/V team.
We are adding the DVD recorder to the setup tomorrow, so we'll see how this turns out.

I think we'll get better results uploading a ripped DVD to vimeo than we did downloading the ustream flv, converting it to mp4, then re-uploading it to vimeo.

[adessmith]

By the way...
Any ideas for getting a 1-1/2 hour 480i DVD to vimeo?
We have the paid version of vimeo, so we have the higher 1GB/file limit.

I found a dvd that is about the same length (1-1/2 hours) and I've used mpeg streamclip to convert the VOB file (from the dvd) to mp4, but I always end up just a little over 1GB at 640x480.

I can drop the resolution of the video to 320x240 and I get below my limit, but I was just wondering if anyone else has any ideas.

Does anyone know of any programs out there which allow you to select a target size, and all your options, and have it automatically adjust the compression and settings to reach that size?

[petereit]

I use Apple's Compressor, so I'm not sure if there is a comparable setting, but I reduce the the bandwith setting to reduce the output file size. I'm able to compress 1 hour of HD video below the 1GB limit by reducing the bandwidth to 1250 and output 50% of my image size (stepping down from 1280 x 720 to 640 x 360)

[JordanN]

I know you said you were planning to drop the HD solution, but I hope it will be OK if I share my workflow anyway?

I record video to the Canon Vixia HF-11, and a separate audio feed from the audio mixer to my laptop using a M-Audio FastTrack USB audio interface. I then import all of the footage and sync up the audio waveforms.

I then render the videos, including a version set to Vimeo's specifications. It's a pretty straightforward process. The only downside is that the 500 MB limit is pretty irritating.

I also upload to the Internet Archive.

[waynehoskins]

If you're on a UNIXy system, you can pipe it through ffmpeg and convert pretty much anything to anything. Something you might try is reducing the audio from two channels to one and maybe even resampling it lower, like 22050 from 44.1. That may do something to reduce the filesize without having to reduce your video resolution or frame rate.

[adessmith]

Yeah, I find that even the 1GB limit was the limiting factor for me when it comes to a SD recording that lasted 1.25 hours yesterday.
I ripped the DVD last night and it took some experimenting to get it under 1GB.
I found that changing any of the audio settings would not reduce the file size enough to make it worthwhile.
I ended up having to drop the bitrate to 1500kbps I think.
I'm using Mpeg streamclip, and this gave me a video just under 1GB, but the quality still leaves a little to be desired.
Sometimes our services stretch on to about 1.5 hours... and I'm afraid to get 1-1/2 hours into 1GB the quality is going to make a considerable drop.

Anyone care to share any additional tricks I can use?

Like I said, I am using mpeg streamclip, and I need to stick to the freeware solutions.
I record between 1 hour and 1.5 hours, in SP mode 480i.
The audio and video quality are equally important.
When converting to mp4, I am using the streamclip defaults, except for selecting deinterlace, and changing the bitrate.

Here is something that has me puzzled:
I have a cannon ZR200 that I regularly use for home videos. I transfer the footage via firewire to ulead video studio and create dvds.
I ripped a 1 hour widescreen home video dvd to mp4 format, using the streamclip defaults, and it came out to 220MB and the quality is pretty decent.
But yet, the 1-1/4 hour long DVD recorded with our sony DVD recorder rips to almost 2 gigs with the same defaults??!!??

[petereit]

What you're seeing is typical. Compression works better the more each frame is identical to the previous. Smooth motion and uniform coloration lead to smaller compression. Both of those are found in studio-produced DVDs of motion pictures. Another factor that leads to smaller compression is the typical 24-frame rate of motion pictures.

When you consider a video shot on a consumer (and most of the lower-end pro-sumer cameras) everything is working against a small files size after compression. Frame rates are higher, camera movement is not as smooth and the sensors used introduce plenty of noise in the video signal. Video noise is probably the worst thing to increase compression size, since noise makes every frame look completely different than the previous frame, effectively forcing your codec to include a complete image each frame.

If you're shooting with a small compression file as a target, make sure you're shooting with plenty of light to reduce video noise as much as possible, using a good fluid-head tripod to ensure steady shots with smooth pans and tilts and shooting at the lowest frame-rate possible (or at least using a good motion-adaptive frame-blending process to drop your frame rate).

[adessmith]

Ahh... so I see something else that probably played a role in the sizes...

The video I shot with my home camcorder was on a tripod, and kept the same frame for the entirety of the recording. Hence the smaller file size.

The video that was recorded at the church was panned and zoomed constantly.

I have tried to explain that we do not want to chase people with the camera. We need to minimize the amount of panning we do, and only use zoom when necessary. The guy that ran the camera this week would zoom right in with a medium-to-extreme close up, then follow every movement that person would make.
Not only does it induce vomiting, it also causes less effecient compression?

When you record someone that paces from one side of the church to the other, you should use a wider shot and move less...

I guess it may help also to manually set the white balance...