The Sunday Post 106: Arizona Balloons
Last weekend, the inaugural Arizona Balloon Classic took place at Wild Horse Pass in Chandler. Not really Wild Horse Pass, but a place called Rawhide. From their site:
>Witness more than 50 hot air balloons take flight both morning and night on November 18, 19 and 20 at Rawhide in Chandler, Arizona.* Don’t miss this unique visual spectacle during the perfect time of year.
50 is more than a bit of a stretch. The actual count on Sunday was closer to 12, and not a single one of them was there at sunrise. A fact I am supremely confident with since we were there at sunrise.
Once the balloons did show up, it was pretty amazing. I’ve never seen anything like this before, at least not up close and personal. Standing right next to each balloon as it was filled with hot air from propane torches that resembled rocket engines was awesome.
The main reason for us going was to snap some photos and video of the balloons, which I did using pretty much all of my gear.
That was shot with my Canon, which couldn’t be in the shot because it was busy taking the shot. Shots that can be seen in my Flickr stream.
And there is video. This video is comprised of video from my the The Flip Mino and Canon HF100. I was going to do some iPhone video in there, but decided against using a 3rd video camera because that’s just silly.
Viddler in HD?
From the Viddler blog.
On Viddler we currently re-encode videos uploaded in all formats except .FLV (Flash Video). As you know, the re-encoded files look amazing, but they might not be up to par with the actual file you uploaded. Alas, if you upload a .FLV file format it will display on Viddler exactly as it did on your computer. Huzzah!
Click through to find out how. If you still have VisualHub, then it’s a snap. But, the big question is, does it work? Check it.
That was exported from iMovie ’09 to 720p (h.264) then run through the flv converter in VH. Bonus is the compression. Original video is 354.4MB. converted is only 72.5.
While I’m still going to be hosting the bulk of my video at Whiteroof.tv, it’s nice to know that I have another option that is not YouTube.
