TimeTraveler

One Year in 40 Seconds

Here is a creative time-lapse project called "One Year in 40 Seconds" by Eirik Solheim a Norwegian digital media technologist. Eirik did a good job of breaking down the magic so that you too can try this at home. Kudos to Eirik for sharing his tricks.

One year in 40 seconds from Eirik Solheim on Vimeo.

My Longest Time-Lapse Yet...

One of the most common comments / critiques is that hear is that my time-lapse movies are too short. That is the nature of the beast... when you speed something up 200-400 times its normal speed it goes by fast!

Here is a time-lapse that I did over Thanksgiving where I had the opportunity of shooting for about 50 hours straight. The whole movie is 6:45 seconds and grooves to one of the best jazz jams of all time: "Blue Rondo a la Turk" by Dave Brubeck. Some of the segments are shot in HDR and others are "straight up". Can you tell which parts are shot in HDR?

I hope you like it....

YouTube & Facebook Now Support HD

I stopped uploading video to YouTube a while ago because of poor quality. This week they launched support for HD. They do not officially support embedding of HD movies but there is an easy hack available here,  that allows you to embed an HD player like this...

The new search bar drives me nuts and I don't like that you can't go full screen but otherwise it is wonderful to finally have HD YouTube. This will be killer on my Apple TV where I would love watch YouTube content but can't get over how bad YouTube quality looks on a 52" plasma.

Facebook also started supporting HD on Friday. They also are now allowing you to embed videos in other sites, a feature that they have somehow not supported up until now. Here is an example of the same video posted to Facebook...

With these two giants stepping up their video support sites like Vimeo are much less differentiated. Vimeo still has a huge advantage in that there is a community of people who are passionate about creating video which is a very powerful thing. Vimeo is the Flickr of video. Vimeo scores points for having the most customizable player. Here is the same video hosted on Vimeo...

Having HD quality for web video is going to be a game changer. The awful video that we have been watching until now reminds me of animated gifs on the web in the mid 90s. Then flash came and showed us what online multimedia could be. Interestingly it is Flash again that is defining what online video can be.