Video is the Future, but not all of it

You just keep hearing that Video is the next big thing on the Internet. Just looking at Youtube, video comments and vBlogs you can see why people are saying this. I’m not saying it’s wrong, but I’m sure it’s not totally true either, and I’m gonna elaborate on this with my own example.

So, I’ve got last month a Toshiba HD Camcorder (actually I’ve won it at a contest. Thank you Toshiba!) and I’ve just started my spielberguesque career. From what I see daylight videos are pretty amazing, while medium and low light shots turn pretty pixelated/grainy, which means you’ll never shot indoor without proper lighting, but I’ve got it for free, so don’t forget that.

Now, to get to the point, the camera saves files in MP4 format using AVC1 codec, which you guessed right, it’s not very common, so I was able to play it only with VLC Media Player (a nice player indeed, as it has all codecs embedded, so no need for search/install/try on Internet).

Now it doesn’t seem such a big problem, but what do you do when you want to edit the video, split it or reconvert it (1 hour of video takes about 10 gigs, so you’ll run out of space on the camera or your PC pretty fast). Sure there’s SUPER video converter that can convert pretty much anything to everything but the end result it’s not great and I’ll tell you why:

The steps that must be done to edit, convert and store an 88 MB, 48 seconds video:

• Copy video from camcorder (takes a few dozen seconds)
• Convert it using SUPER (I only managed to convert it to MPG, not AVI) in a 2000kbps 14 MB file
• Edit it in Ulead VideoStudio (a pretty simple and straight forward video editor) in a few minutes
• Export it from Ulead, which did take ~30 minutes (I’ve managed to watch the last episode of Californication during this time) in a 55 MB file
• Upload to Youtube which isn’t ready after one hour (I have a pretty good Internet connection, but I’m not living in US…)

Now that’s a lot of time (over 2 hours) for just under one minute video file. What’s worse than that: the end result, a file that doesn’t seem HD at all and it’s just slightly smaller than the original one.

What I’m saying is that Internet is not the answer (maybe yet) for storing your digital media library, which is supposed to be done without loss of quality as you might want to show your youth adventures to your grandkids later in your life when Super Mega HD or whatever is mainstream then.

But let’s not freak out for just a few cases when Internet can’t provide you with a sollution and do something about it, even if it doesn’t prove intuitive or great (just like my case). By the way, any suggestions for editing AVC1 MP4 files out of the box are welcome.