The Latest YouTube Sensations!

Cols recently bought a point-and-click Canon Powershot SX210IS digital camera. Among its many DSLR-like features, it has the ability to record high-definition (HD) video @ 720 lines. Its not really Full HD (1080), but 720 is pretty high already.

I shot Caitlin and Ethan singing Justin Bieber's song, Baby. Its a 3-minute-plus video. But at HD recording rate, that translates to more than a whopping 600MB+ in file size! To upload it to YouTube, I have to reduce the file significantly. I normally use the freely downloadable Microsoft Windows Media Encoder. There is just one problem in this case -- Canon records in Quicktime .MOV format and Windows Media Encoder does not support that format.

Media Encoder is actually a very old software. The latest equivalent software is the Microsoft Expression Encoder 4.0. Its also available from Microsoft as a free download. It requires .NET Framework 4.0 and Windows XP SP3 or better.

Expression Encoder is not as simple to use as Media Encoder. With Media Encoder, you use a wizard which leads you through a series of dialog windows to accomplish your task. With Expression Encoder, the plethora of options available on screen is daunting. It took me quite some time to figure out what I needed to do.

But I was able to finally reduce my video into 10mb -- by using only 12 frames-per-sec, reduced frame size, mono audio and much lower sampling rate. The result can be seen below. Go kids!