{"id":881,"date":"2014-05-01T15:12:34","date_gmt":"2014-05-01T20:12:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/?p=881"},"modified":"2014-05-01T15:12:34","modified_gmt":"2014-05-01T20:12:34","slug":"snowshoe-to-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/littlesvr.ca\/grumble\/2014\/05\/01\/snowshoe-to-work\/","title":{"rendered":"Snowshoe to work"},"content":{"rendered":"

After going to one of our campuses (Newnham<\/span>) on cross-country skis I decided to give showshoeing<\/span> a try for my everyday campus (Seneca@York). I enjoyed it so much I did it all winter long.<\/p>\n

Video was edited with Cinelerra<\/span>, though not much editing was needed. I’ll make some notes about the process here because I already forgot what I did the last time<\/a> a mere two weeks ago:<\/p>\n

My camera (a Sony HDR-PJ200<\/span>) creates MTS files (which apparently are AVCHD<\/span> – a piece of information that’s useful to know when looking through endless lists of format capabilities). These are 1080i<\/span>, which is not quite as good as 1080p<\/span> and this is important to know not only because of the resolution and aspect ratio but also because “i<\/span>” is for interlaced, and not all programs deinterlace<\/span> automatically (e.g. VLC).<\/p>\n

I cannot use MTS files in Cinelerra<\/span>. In fact very little software supports them in any fashion. So the first step was to find a format that Cinelerra<\/span> could use as a source and wouldn’t lose too much of my high quality. Originally I used DV, but I was later annoyed to discover that DV is 3:4 which squeezes my image way too much. I tried a high quality MP4 wiht<\/span> h264<\/span> compression but Cinelerra<\/span> can’t handle playing that back. Finally I settled on MPEG2<\/span> with AC3<\/span> audio in an MPG container.<\/p>\n

I converted my MTS files to MPG using a very handy graphical tool called WinFF<\/span>. That is little more than a GUI that will create an ffmpeg<\/span> command, but if you’ve ever tried to write an ffmpeg<\/span> command you’ll know how valuable it is. The preset I used in WinFF<\/span> is called “DVD\/NTSC DVD HQ Widescreen”. The resulting files were about 25-30% the size of the originals but the quality was quite good enough.<\/p>\n

In Cinelerra<\/span> I imported the MPG files and edited the video. Then I remembered to set my project settings for 16:9 video (I chose 720×480), thankfully that part didn’t require me to reedit<\/span> anything.<\/p>\n

Finally I rendered the video into:<\/p>\n