Cooper River Bridge Run 2010 - Processing for YouTube

In a previous blog entry I touted that YouTube can process my camera's raw video files. Well it turns out that it doesn't always work. I uploaded some Cooper River Bridge Run videos and they played back at twice the speed. As a rule you don't want to convert your videos before processing. You never want a copy of a copy but this time I had no choice.
Here was my workflow for my Cooper River Bridge Run 2010 videos which can be found on my YouTube channel. My computer operating system is Ubuntu 9.10.

• Charge camera batteries the day before the shoot
  
• Pack gear. Include a collapsible chair.
  
• Travel to site and find a good location. To avoid traffic, I parked my truck before the Cooper River Bridge and bicycled the rest of the way.
  
• Shoot video (on a tri-pod)
  
• Return home and connect camera to PC via USB cable
  
• Copy MTS AVCHD video files to PC
  
• Search for and then download DRM-free music. I chose Cavanshawn on Jamendo.
  
• Review video clips
  
• Concatenate video clips using the cat command.
  

  cat scene1.MTS scene2.MTS > bothscenes.MTS.

• Use ffmpeg to combine the audio and transcode the video to something YouTube can handle consistently.
  

  ffmpeg -i bothscenes.MTS -i "/var/lib/mythtv/music/Cavashawn/02 Madison.mp3" -vcodec libxvid -b 18000k -shortest -deinterlace -s 1920x1080 -map 0:0 -map 1:0 bothscenes.avi

• Copy the AVI file to a USB thumb drive
  
• Make a trip to work to upload the video to YouTube.
  
• I usually set the videos to Private initially. If the video looks OK on YouTube I then change it to Public. The change from private to public is not immediate. So wait before you publicize.
  

If you are wondering why I took a trip to work. I have a ATT DSL connection at home. The upload speed is 500kbps at best. Uploading a 3 minute video segment takes hours. If you make a mistake or YouTube fails a weekend project can turn in to a week long project. Upload speed matters when you are publishing video.

My YouTube channel