Cruisin' Video Clips #1 -- Leaving San Juan at Night

If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video must be good for 30,000 words every second.

Here is a little video showing San Juan at night from the vantage point of a departing cruise ship.

For best enjoyment, first turn out the lights and imagine yourself on deck, as the sun sets and the ship slowly sails out of the harbor past the lighted fort.

Click here for the San Juan video (Windows Media 9, 5.6 MB, 2:37 (4,710,000 words), stereo sound). View at the original size (320x240) for best quality picture.

chesterh

Very Nice Chesterh! Thanks!

I am impressed!!

I would pay for a class on video editing.

And I havent a clue where you post a video that will come up on a URL address for the public to access it.

I post pics but dont know where to post videos.

Good job,

Don

I remember Old San Juan; I absolutely loved it! The lady I was cruising with spoke fluent Spanish and asked the taxi driver to "take us away from the tourist area to a restraunt where the locals eat." Up winding roads and hills we went until we reached a small street with Amadeus restraunt. Oh my. We had dinner outside under the trees; I'll never forget it, it was fab!!!

Leaving San Juan was as beautiful as I remember it. Thank you for the wonderful video!!!

Thanks Crystynatheone, Don and House_Atreides. When we lived on St Thomas, Kris and I used to hop over to PR just to ‘stretch our legs’. It is indeed a beautiful place. Leaving the harbor on board a ship was a nice new perspective.

Don, go for it. Video making is a lot of fun – most PCs are well equipped for the task. With a DV camera (one that records to tape, NOT DVD), a firewire board and some software, you’re in business (or at least ready to practice).

The only practical way to solve the posting problem is to sign up for a ‘real’ web hosting service; one where you get gigabytes of storage space and a generous monthly bandwidth allocation. I don’t know of any free service on the Internet that can handle the demands of video. It is possible to get a very capable setup for $7/mo.

chesterh

Chester:

Thanks for the info. I am in the mkt for a nice digital camera but havent found quite what I want. There are Sony's Panasonics and JVC's out there in all price ranges but digital video just doesnt do it for me yet.

Youve answered the question why I cant post videos anywhere like you can with stills. Bandwith, size of the videos.

Once I get my camera (i have the firewire plug and port in my Dell) I can look for a site to post videos.

Unfortunately, if you like to take videos, I bet a 20 min video or ten 5 minute videos take up an incredible amount of space on a site.

With Webshots I get to post 3,000 pics for $30 a yr. And Webshots downgrades the pixels automatically to save room. I would need gigabytes of storage to post the videos I forsee taking on my cruises once I get the right camera.

I had a JVC MD70 video camera, small palm size aluminum body, it was very costly 4 yrs back but I got rid of it since it didnt take good night pictures. My Hi8 Sony from 12 yrs back took better night pics than the digital JVC, go figure.

I would like to learn editing and putting music to videos as you did!!

thanks, Don

The source material from the camera requires 3.6 MB of disk space on your computer per second. Once you've edited the video and saved it to a file, you can compress it to varying degrees using a free encoder available from Microsoft (click here). It is difficult to maintain picture quality at small file sizes. Figure on 2-3 MB/min at half size for something watchable.

There isn't a whole lot of difference in image quality among consumer-level cameras. The DV standard makes the playing field pretty level, and higher prices generally get you in-camera editing features that are superfluous if you plan to edit on a computer. To notice a real difference you need to go to a ‘prosumer’ ($2000+) model with 3 (versus the normal 1) CCDs. However, if your viewing target is the web, the extra quality will be totally lost in the compression process. Of course, pretty soon HD cameras will become mainstream and we’ll have to start all over again.

Sorry… I tend to get a little carried away -- but I'm glad to help.

chesterh

ChesterH.. How beautiful!!! Great video..

Thank you, waterbound. Not nearly as beautiful as the real thing, but a fine substitute for the snowbound (like us)...

All the best,

chesterh

great video...do I recognize those boys from the Men in Black video?

Dayna84 -- Indeed, they are the very same lads. This video was actually shot earlier in the same week as Young Men in Black, and is a candid portrait. Their grueling acting career didn’t start until a few days later.

We all wish we were back on board. Thanks for watching…

All the best,

chesterh

old topics never die:

As Iwere in Old san jaun last 2012, the memories of seeing it 7 years earlier, is awesome.

thanks for sharing the clip :)

Wow - that was a while back. I don't think Youtube even existed then. I'll have to see if I can find the original material and get a better quality version of this posted. Good memories...

chesterh

No Youtube came on around 2007 a few months prior my joining them LOl.