Video observations

[Steve Knight]

Just returned from a week in arctic Norway. I managed to capture some nice (I think) videos of aurora showing some high speed movement. Struggling to post the observations. I have produced some GIF’s but the 2MB limit is just not enough. Any suggestions on the best way to proceed would be most welcome.

• This topic was modified 2 years, 8 months ago by Steve Knight.

[Alex Pratt]

Hi Steve,

If one of my GIFs is larger than the 2MB limit I upload it to my YouTube channel, then provide a link to it on my BAA Member’s Page. Other media hosting options are available.

Cheers,

Alex.

[Alex Pratt]

I can’t see an option to allow me to edit my previous message. I should have written “If one of my videos is larger than the 2MB limit I upload it to my YouTube channel using one of its supported formats…”.

Alex.

[Dominic Ford]

Dear Steve,

I saw some of your videos on Facebook, and they’re absolutely stunning!

Unfortunately you’re right that there’s not really a way to post large videos on the BAA site currently. Basically, hosting video files comes with a whole load of additional complications (very large file sizes, different codec / container choices, the need to stream lower-resolution transcoded video files to mobile devices, etc, etc). We took a conscious decision when setting up the observation archive that hosting video would be an entirely different project from trying to host images. Inevitably, whatever quality setting we picked in the transcoder, I suspect half the BAA would complain the quality wasn’t high enough, meanwhile the other half would complain the files were too big to fit down their dodgy internet connections. 🙂

The facility to post animated GIFs was a compromise solution we added to allow small animations to be posted.

My recommendation would be that you upload the videos to YouTube, and then post a still-image from the video to your member album, with a link to the full video on YouTube? That way, we outsource the difficult video-streaming problem to YouTube. This is actually the same approach the BAA takes to hosting its meeting videos nowadays.

Best wishes,

Dominic

[Steve Knight]

Hi Dominic,

Thanks for the kind words about the videos. I have a lot more of those, just trying to extract the interesting stuff.

I have tried including a Vimeo link in the description of an image but it does not appear as a hyperlink, one has to copy and paste the URL into your browser if you want to view it.

I guess that is a necessary security feature?

Cheers

Steve

[Dominic Ford]

Hi Steve,

You should be able to post links in the description of your image, though unfortunately the software doesn’t automatically spot web addresses and turn them into hyperlinks currently.

When editing your observation, you just need to select the text of the web address, and then click on the “link” item in the formatting toolbar above the description editor (the icon on the far right which looks like a pair of handcuffs). A pop-up window will then invite you to enter the URL you want your text to link to.

Best wishes,

Dominic

[Steve Knight]

Hi Dominic, thenks, that was very useful. After some extreme compression and cropping I managed to produce <2MB GIFs. It was a challenge but I did it! Thanks for changing the formatting on the vimeo link. I have now figured out how to do it! Steve

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