online photo tutorials

Flickr recently gave users the possibility to upload video. While there has been an outrage over the “YouTube-ization” of flickr; the idea is not inherently flawed. flickr is primarily a photography website, and youtube is primarily a video website. However, the two look at entirely different uses of their respective mediums.

While YouTube is great for uploading a video from your webcam or home camera, it really didn’t catch on with corporate or professional users, like the BBC channel or UniversalMusic, until recently.

flickr is something of the opposite. The majority of users have a digital SLR, Photoshop, and are very enthusiastic about learning more about their hobbies — be it macro photography, DIY, lighting, color correction. flickr is a great place for photographers to learn and gain exposure. Similar to the production values of a BBC documentary, flickr video gives users a better chance to upload high-quality, well lit, properly produced videos.

YouTube can be seen as more of a ‘time-waster’, for browsing between lunch breaks.

So why the animosity created by the recent flickr video announcement? Are people afraid that there will be politically-driven videos, like C-Span debates or conspiracy theories? Are people afraid that it will be overrun by music videos or videos of skateboarders being punched by police officers?

flickr video will be a great place for art videos or short instructional videos. The hugely successful strobist blog could accept quick DIY project videos, rather than a page of photographs with accompanying text. The limiting factor of one minute and thirty seconds means that the user must really compress and edit the bad footage out and create a more polished product, whereas the high level of quality provided by the 150MB cap shows that this will be more about high quality videography rather than camera phone recordings.I tried to create a video tutorial about a feature of the D300, and even after refining it I found that it came out to be 2:13. Maybe the 1:30 time cap is a bit too limiting.

So what do I think should be changed about flickr’s video site?

First off, there’s a small bug in that when flickr links to a video, it does not link to it as http://www.flickr.com/video, it links to it as http://flickr.com/video. A small issue, but it looks odd if you link to both a video and an image in the same post.

As you can see by the image uploaded here, it’s an odd standard for videos — a 3:2 aspect ratio. However, this is the native output of both 1.5x crop and full-frame SLRs, 35mm film, 6×9 medium format roll film. It seems odd that a website primarily structured around photography would ignore the 3:2 aspect ratio, and go in favor of a 500 x 375 size video. Already the flideo function has caught on with timelapse photographers, whose native sizes are 3:2. The current aspect ratio is 4:3, that of YouTube, which doesn’t covers native video cameras and doesn’t cover native digital SLRS or point at shoots. It makes sense for YouTube to use a 4:3 aspect ratio, as they have a very large demographic of cameraphones and webcams — but this isn’t the goal of the flickr video [presumably].

Secondly, the 500 x 375 limit at one minute and thirty seconds shows that the 150MB file limit was not well thought out. Either lower the file size limit, or enlarge the video size / length. The screenshot I’ve uploaded was my timelapse video as played on my computer. It’s a 9.9MB file, 1440 x 1080, 11 seconds long. How would a user fill up 150MB in nintey seconds at 500 x 375 if an HD Video is less than one megabyte per second?

Thirdly, looking at the final video after it was uploaded to flickr, you’ll notice two things as compared to the original video in the above screenshot. Both the black bars at the top and bottom were removed by stretching the video, and the black bars at the sides were not removed. This is an odd choice by flickr — why stretch the videos? The ideal choice would be a simple online video editor, or a downloadable program [like the existing uploading tools], to help you trim off black bars as you see fit.

A final critique about the video system is that it doesn’t integrate with flickr’s existing setup. In order to watch a video while in a slideshow, you have to open the original 500 x 375 video on the video’s page, ruining the “on-black” setup that the slideshow uses. flickr could be a pioneer in online video by allowing the fullsize, original upload to play in the fullscreen slideshow mode — rather than the heavily compressed and downscaled 500 x 375. While videos and images interspersed in a slideshow have some shortcomings, they should be customizable like the rest of the website. There could easily be a “Start Videos Automatically in Slideshows” preference in your control panel.

flickr video, or flideo, is a project which is still in an infant stage — it needs to be reworked and fixed until we are satisfied with it. flickr’s choice to only allow “Pro” users the video upload prevents a lot of issues that YouTube has with copyright problems, but it also gives them the weight of this being a paid service, holding it to higher standards than YouTube.

That being said, there are many advantages over other online video hosts. Uploading the 9.9MB time lapse to flickr took less than a minute, and after uploading it was ready to view. YouTube’s video service to seven minutes to upload the same video and four minutes to process. The quality looks great, despite the small size, with no blocks or jagged edges and other compression artifacts. While YouTube is a completely different service aimed more towards giving anyone a spot to upload a video, rather than giving people a chance to upload high-quality videos with an aim towards art, a quality comparison can be made with the YouTube upload here. The flickr video equivalent is located at my flickr here.

If you have any questions or other points to add, leave them in the comments here.

This post is tagged flickr, flickr video, flideo