So why would YouTube do this when the vast majority of user’s videos aren’t in that dimension?

Easy.

HD, baby.

Check out this video in amazing 720p high def on YouTube.

To see if a video is in YouTube in widescreen/HD, add this to the end of the URL string:

&fmt=22

Here’s the other very interesting thing. You can embed these widescreen HD videos as well, with a simple hack of the embedding code. Here’s the code:

<object width="480" height="397"><param name="movie" value="(VIDEO EMBED URL)&ap=%2526fmt%3D22"></param><param name="wmode" value="window"></param><embed src="(VIDEO EMBED URL)&ap=%2526fmt%3D22" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" wmode="window" width="480" height="397"></embed></object>

Thanks to Webmonkey for the code. This is very interesting. I’m getting stuttering HD playback here – how is the playback for you?

This webinar will provide an overview of the available video sites out there including the different types of YouTube channels, affordable and scalable cloud hosting, Facebook, Vimeo and more. He will also share tips and best practices to promote and track the success of your videos on the Web.

Whether your institution is just getting into online video or you’re experienced, I think you’ll find this webinar informative and educational. You can register online.

I’ve attended as well as spoken at several webinars put on by HigerEdExperts.com and they are always informative and get you thinking. Karine Joly, HigherEdExperts wrangler and EduWeb keynote speaker, always makes sure that things are running smoothly and the sessions are productive.

I should step back a second and note that when I say iMovie, I don’t mean the most recent overhaul of iMovie that was released as part of iLife ’08. If you have a new Mac, you can download the last version of iMovie here.

Capturing is one of iMovie’s great strengths. Dumping from tape is easy but I actually capture a different way. For some shoots, I capture video live on location directly from the camera into iMovie. For starters, this is a good method for longer productions since you don’t have to switch tapes during a show and miss something. Second, it saves time later on when it’s time to capture video, again, especially for large pieces.

iMovie captures and edits HD with no problems at all. We’ve shot a few projects in HD and it’s been a champ. It takes more disk room and more time to render in HD, but the wait is well worth it.

Once you’ve edited your video, you can output to a variety of formats and media, including iDVD. Most times, we output MP4 H.264 files that we either transfer to high quality FLV and post online* (example here), or use this high quality file as the basis for what we upload to YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, etc.

Here, for example, is a video we shot on location in downtown Meadville. The event was a fundraiser for downtown development, and our new president participated as a server at this 50′s-style event.

Allegheny Community Participates in Up With Downtown from Allegheny College on Vimeo.

If you want to see it in full HD, click here.

In the end, I move iMovie. It’s easy, yet allows me to quickly produce tightly edited pieces with graphics, music, cuts and more.

* – Videos are stored at Amazon S3. Of course, right?

Hey Watch is an online service that lets you encode video into a myriad of formats, including Flash H.264. What’s interesting about this web service is that each encode only costs $0.10, based on a credit system.

In early tests, I’ve been disappointed by the encoding done by Hey Watch. The audio encoding was bad and it played choppy in Quicktime Pro, VLC and a few other players. Obviously, this isn’t acceptible.

I’m rendering out a very large, very high quality file to see if that makes a difference.

This video, which supports our Annual Fund, was dead simple to produce. We setup in our newly renovated library and interviewed two students. In terms of production, all we did was mic our interviewees. There was no lighting setup, and we were in and out in a half an hour.

To edit, we dumped our footage into iMovie HD (not the new, weird one, but the last version). We edited together everything quickly, but ran into some trouble with getting the titles correct. iMovie didn’t like making titles look correct in a 16×9 aspect ratio. Everything kept coming back squished. So, we ended up making all the titles and other slides in Photoshop.

Did you know there are TV sizes and ratios that are available in Photoshop? When I select new document, most of the time I stay up near the top of the list, since those are web and print sizes I often work in. But, down there at the bottom, is this list of presets:

At first, we tried 1440×1080 anamorphic and iMovie was still squishing it, meaning it wasn’t un-anamorphing it correctly (wow, that’s not even a word). Anamorphic video is video that’s been squeezed and if viewed before being correctly resized or put through a filter, either digital or optical, will look squished. This site has a great description of it. After some trial and error, we found the best size was 1920×1080. iMovie took these in without issue and kept everything smooth and fixed. Note to self: iMovie doesn’t like anamorphic files.

We exported a full-size, fully HD version of the video. Using VisualHub, we output a 640×360 FLV version for the web. At high settings, the 3 minute and 30 second video came in at roughly 25mb. I know that Flash will not play videos encoded in H.264 but I don’t have a full version of Flash to encode in. Are there standalone programs (preferably Mac) that will encode Flash video in H.264?

For our web page, I used the JW FLV player. The JW player is easy to setup and configure, and does some cool stuff like reporting video views to Google Analytics. The video file is hosted at, of course, Amazon S3.

Since we launched this video last Friday and sent an email out to donors, we’ve gotten a good number of gifts.

What I liked best about this is the speed at which the whole project came together. Over the course of 3 days we brainstormed an idea, shot, edited, produced graphics, created music, encoded and distributed. It’s that kind of nimbleness that not only makes the job fun but shows to departments around campus that we’re able to quickly and professionally respond to hot issues and challenges.