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Mono Lake Sunset Moon Rise (HD Video)

Here’s a time-lapse video of the Mono Lake sunset moon rise I captured a couple of nights ago.  I created this video from 400+ individual photos captured every 2 seconds over the course of 15 minutes.  These were converted to video with a playback rate of 30 per second, the time is effectively sped up 60 times in this video.

I’m uploading copies of this to +YouTube (1080p), +Vimeo (1080p), +SmugMug (1080p), +Google+ / *Picasa* (720p) and other sites to see which supports the best video playback quality.

Vimeo prefers the more compact but lower quality MP4 encoding, and they automatically down-convert to 720p HD, but offer the option to override that and “up-convert” to 1080p (hopefully they actually use the original 1080p upload).
https://vimeo.com/56457269

I noticed that stock photography video site Alamy recommends Quicktime / MOV encoding.  They require shipping a hard disk to submit video, but I used that format advice to upload a high quality copy to SmugMughttp://jeffsullivan.smugmug.com/photos/i-Q3p8WbD/0/X3/i-Q3p8WbD-X3.jpg

YouTube supports the higher quality MOV format as well.  Like many of the sites, you’ll have to select an HD format such as 1080p to try the site’s handling of that playback resolution: http://youtu.be/GSXu9l4g7t8

I may try another stock video site such as +Pond5, but I notice that they’re giving a lot of video away, so I’ll have to examine their terms and conditions carefully to make sure that my videos wouldn’t be automatically enrolled in that program.  I’m also concerned about any site described by some as micro-stock.   Photos and especially videos are expensive to capture and produce; driving market rates down challenges the ability of people to capture them professionally, and so far there have not been new uses and markets created by the lower prices which make up for the reductions in price (analogous to low cost MP3 downloads creating a new multi-billion dollar market for music).  I do think that such a new market is possible, if music were easier and less expensive to combine with moving images.  Music startup Jamendo does offer the ability to license music to combine with video, but it’s too expensive to the video producer (even for something as simple as using music solely in a YouTube video), preventing the creation of that new market.

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31 thoughts on “Mono Lake Sunset Moon Rise (HD Video)”

  1. It's so cool +logan hubbard to be able to anticipate these events days or weeks in advance, and simply check the Web cam to confirm a reasonably clear sky, then show up a few minutes in advance to set up and capture it.  None of the mystery is taken away; there's still a lot of anticipation and suspense regarding how it's going to turn out.

  2. I've previously used free music from Jamendo on some small personal video projects. It's a fantastic option if you don't mind sharing your work under Creative Commons. 

    How did your comparison of the different video sharing services come out? In general I think the Vimeo experience is way better than Youtube – it's much more focused on creators. I've never been disappointed with their video quality – and as far as I'm aware, the H.264 encoding is generally considered to give a very high quality at a small size.

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