MacScreencasting

While shooting our family July 4th video at the Kansas City T-Bones game, I got an error message when I tried to upload it wirelessly to YouTube. Yes, I kept my unlimited data plan so I wasn’t too concerned about the MB’s. But even with the compression and Medium 640 x 360p output, it crapped out on me.

Not to worry though. Where there’s a will, there’s got to be a geeky way.

I uploaded the video to Dropbox instead.

Dropbox is a cloud based storage area. I use it to transfer large business files to clients. I can create a directory, place files in it, and share the directory only with that client. It’s a great service and you get 2 GB’s free to try it out. What was great though was that I could upload a video from my Camera Roll to it. It compressed the file and uploaded it to my Public Dropbox file.

I tried using Box.net too but their app didn’t recognize movies on my iPhone.

Once uploaded to Dropbox, I could quickly share the link via email so I could let the grandparents know that night’s video was available. I also liked the added security knowing that this video wasn’t available on YouTube for the whole world to see. There’s a place for that (like this video!) but sometimes you don’t want everyone to see it. I could have just as easily created a shared directory on Dropbox and uploaded the video there where only they could access the directory. For ease, I just placed it in the Public folder.

Uploaded business, client, and training videos to your Dropbox account can be a great way to immediately share your iPhone videos. And you may find it a little more reliable too.

A lot of people have commented that iMovie on the iPhone won’t wirelessly export HD movies. And at first, I too was disappointed. However, it’s not that bad. Here’s why.

This video shows the differences between the HD, Large, and Medium export settings in iMovie. Yes, the HD version looks bad, but if you’re doing mobile video editing, you’re not going to be able to upload it anyway. The files are way too big. I exported the exact same video all 3 ways into iPhoto. Here are the sizes for the exact same 1:49 minute movie:

1280 x 720 HD  138 MB
960 x 540 Large  70 MB
640 x 360 Medium  47 MB

There is no way AT&T or any other carrier would let you upload those types of file sizes. But for web video, I don’t think this is a problem. That’s because most websites and blogs do best with 640 x 360 video anyway. The HD and Large videos are just too big for most web pages. Therefore, I think you’ll be surprised with the quality of the Medium 360p output setting.

The other thing I noticed was that YouTube degraded the quality further. It wasn’t much, but it was noticeable.

This video wasn’t shot with my iPhone obviously. But the video I’ve seen and knowing that I embed 640 x 360 into my blog page anyway, I think the Medium 640 x360 iPhone output is acceptable. Can you live with your 640 x 360 output for now?

[View iPhone version]