Michigan Muscle Boy

Fixing the video podcast on Muscle Ventures

Videocasting is compelling because you can illustrate points with a short demonstration that can be all but impossible to convey with still pictures and words.  Further, it is nice that is in reach of a large number of people, not just those with thousands to spend on high end equipment.

Recently, we had the embarassment of discovering that recent versions of our MuscleVentures video podcast could not open on the ipod.  I posted about it a couple of days ago.  Well, I have the solution, and it comes from this article on the Apple site.  Essentially, if you are going to produce mp4 files in Quicktime that you expect to play on the ipod, you need to follow the specifications at the bottom of the article exactly.  In particular, you need to make sure that you are using the "baseline" profile.

Henceforth, our videos should play on the ipod.  At least, they check out as doing so on my version of iTunes.

I'm probably going to write a series on video podcasting for the masses on my TheCommunityEngine site where I go into much more detail.

Podcast's Bane

Think of this as being like Isildur's bane from Lord of the Rings.  You think you can do just a little bit of it, but it becomes all consuming.

Chris D. has mentioned that he is not able to load Muscle Ventures Podcasts onto his iPod.  I'm investigating.  It should work, but I suspect the data rate is off.  This source may have some hints, but in production at least, I seem to be following the guidelines.  I may be forced to get a video iPod to test.

Video is a snakepit.

Camcorder test concluded

Well, my conclusion from the video experiment that I conducted yesterday is that the still camera beats the video camera for what I am doing.  I thought I might get better low light performance out of the camcorder a Canon ZR200, but no, it was in fact worse.  A further surprise was that editing video from the camcorder was much less convenient than editing it from the camera.  Why?  Well, with the camcorder, I have to wind and unwind tape.  Data only comes in serially.  The conversion time I discussed yesterday is made up for by the tape winding factor.

Scott Bird suggested this little gem of a solid state video camera that saves files in AVI format for $130.  Well, on all counts, it's worse than the Exilim I currently own.  In particular, the display on the back of the camera is an inch smaller than the current one.  We have used the back of the camera display for field work, and at 2.5 inches it's actually effective.  More would be better.

If I could get good low light performance, a feature that depends direclty on imaging chip size, and zoom during filming, and somewhat better sound, with something similar to what I currently have, I'd be happy.  Remarkably, it sounds like help may be on the way by late this year or early next.

Camcorders are dinosaurs

I've been using iMovie, an Apple product, to quickly bang out the podcasts on over on Muscle Ventures.  One feature I've noted about iMovie is that its native format is DV, i.e., the stuff that comes out of your digital camcorder.

Now, I have been capturing videos by using the movie feature of my mass market Casio Exilim EX-Z750.  I can get up to 30 minutes video on a 1 GB memory card  The Casio does not use the uncompressed DV format but rather uses an AVI container with a highly compressed MPEG-4 video.  I've noticed that getting this into iMovie requires about 1 minute per minute of video.  Shoot a 20 minute video, count on at least 20 minutes to convert the footage.  On a side note, the footage will play immediately in Quicktime, seemingly the Swiss Army Knife of all things video, so you can decide if it is any good before committing to the conversion.

Well, conversion has been a headache.  Further, shooting video on a still camera is temperamental at best, particularly in low light situations (below 100 lux).  So, I decided to run an experiment with a super low-end camcorder we bought last year.  I'm in the middle of the experiment, but I have an initial observation.  Camcorders, even digital ones, are not really made for shooting film that is going to appear on anything other than a TV or simulated TV.  The device is built for shooting in landscape mode and only landscape mode.  However, there are plenty of times when the situation calls for portrait mode.  It's just more efficient for capturing standing full body shots.  Further, why be constrained to a 4:3 or 16:9 aspect ratio.  That all feels like it should be mutable.

My guess is that I am likely to stick with movie mode on mass market still cameras.  They're definitley limited in terms of the quality of the video, but they allow me more flexibility in the size and angle of image I capture.  What I'd really like is a video-oriented camera built for people who are mainly going to broadcast on the Internet.  That camera would have mutable aspect ratios that allowed me to capture the highest resolution the camera was capable of for the area I wanted to video.  It would be small and portable.  It would have excellent low-light performance.  It would capture a minimum 30 minutes of video on a 1 GB card.  I'm actually willing to compromise on the last point as well as the mutable aspect ratio which sounds a little pie-in-the-sky.

Finally, Mastering the New Camera

Well, I have two new tripods for under $10, one of them is actually the $3 little wonder you see pictured on the right from amazon.  The thing's a hoot.  It gives you about 4.5 inches and holds the camera steady.  The legs are meant to be bent; that's how you adjust the camera angle.  And, there's an added benefit, you can wrap them around gym equipment to capture all sorts of angles.

I have also figured out a few things about the camera itself, a Casio Exilim Z750.  The auto white adjust performs poorly for indoor shots, giving you sometimes strongly oversaturated colors.  However, the indoor presets are good, giving the camera a superior performance overy many poiint-and-shoots.  You'll start to see that with today's stuff.  Those shots should start appearing over the weekend if not before.

A few updates

I've been doing some work on the Muscle Ventures podcast site.  We have up several new podcasts, the most recent of which I shot with a new Casio Exilim EX-Z750.  Comparing the camera with my older Canon SD250 Elph, the one clear difference is that the new one holds much longer videos, about 30 minutes vs. 8 for the same size card.  The image quality seems to be better also. 

There are a few drawbacks though.  The exilim needs tweaking for color to perform well in indoor light.  Don't tweak, and darker people come out looking extremely dark, kind of like chocoloate bars.  As Nancy has tanned, she has gotten to look more and more like a chocolate bar.  I'm still perfecting this.

The podcast site now has an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures for the videos, and videos don't start to load until you click them.  Here are the topics covered in the new podcasts:

• Nancy and I discuss how difficult it is to recover from weight training while heavily dieting for her bodybuilding contest.
• Nancy tells how she met her diet guru Kevin.
• Nancy lays out her competition posing routine.

How Mary Reiter started bodybuilding

This post continues the video podcast series that Nancy and I started yesterday.  Here, I talk to Mary Reiter who has been Nancy's coach for close to 4 years.  In this conversation, Mary talks about her first steps into bodybuilding, a story I had never heard, and her motivations for starting, something I have heard about frequently.

You can go to the podcast page which contains additional links and discussion by clicking on Mary's picture.  You can access the large (20 MB) podcast directly here.

For our first podcast, Scott Bird remarked on the shakiness of the shooting.  We had noticed that also, and I took some steps to correct it here by steadying my hands on a table for this last podcast that was filmed Monday.  That worked partially.  A test of piStabilize, a plug-in for the iMovie software that we are using to produce these videos suggests that relatively inexpensive image stabilization software can fix the problem but only at the cost of some quality at the image periphery and a lot of processing time.  I have opted to obtain a $2.31 mini tripod from Amazon that sounds very versatile and should be here next week.  I think something like that is the real solution.

Images for our new site

These images represent some doodling for the new Muscle Ventures site that Nancy Arnold and I started to put together at the beginning of the month.  Believe it or not, there is a t-shirt coming to my house using them.  I suspect they are really too complicated for that.  They may work well for things like web banners, etc.  Any thoughts?

BTW, you can check out and even buy the t-shirt I made with these images at our beta shopping site.

Another sumo video deadlift test

Scott Bird suggested castpost.  How does castpost work for video?  Well, we return to our perennial favorite, Nancy Arnold performing the sumo deadlift.  Here's the video. 

The presentation is not bad.  There is no format conversion.  One of the major issues with video is getting a format that will work for your whole audience.  Castpost leaves this to the auteur suggesting it is really a product for knowledgeable people.

I worry about castpost's potential longevity.  What's the business model.  Right now, they are trying an ad model.  I'm getting playing on this site for free.

Testing video formats with bent legged deadlifts

Here's a little test of the new video service from google.  Scott Bird kind of got me thinking about alternative delivery formats for the videos I have been posting since that can really suck down bandwidth, and I now agree with him about google video.  Generally speaking, it's a pain.  You have to wait two days to get the video approved, then the quality of the streaming first play tends to be choppy (though smooth on later plays), and finally the downloadable video can only be described as an utterly transmogrified version of what you originally submitted.

For my test, I used a video of Nancy Arnold performing sumo deadlifts from a workout that took place on February 17.

So, looking at the quality, it's adequate for a quick view, although Nancy's face is just a blob (the face is, in reality, quite attractive; odd how I used my training partner and not me for this test :).  You do get the idea of what is going on, although  Flash, used by google, is clearly not an action video format.  If I could pop these things up and get them approved in say 10 minutes, I might use it.

Generally speaking, the dirty little secret of video is the amount of time it takes to process just so it will display on the web.  Anything to speed that up.