(If you think this story I’m about to tell is extremely vague, then that’s good, because I intended it to be like that in order to protect the identities of the people involved in the story.)

Yesterday, someone sent me a video to work with. After I received the video and opened it up, I noticed that it was recorded at a 16:9 ratio but was rendered at a 4:3 ratio and 480p quality, sized at about 23 megabytes. (For those who don’t know, 16:9 ratio is widescreen and 4:3 ratio is the old TV ratio. If you render a 16:9 clip at 4:3, it creates black bars at the top and bottom.)

I just used the video that I received, but told her for future reference that she should render her videos in widescreen high-definition in the future to make them better-quality. I told her the one she sent now was fine, but she insisted on rerendering her video.

She asked me for specific instructions, but she uses Final Cut Pro and I use Sony Vegas Pro so I couldn’t really help her out that much. Instead, I went on Google and searched for how to render in high definition on Final Cut Pro. I emailed her a link to a screenshot showing the rendering settings.

Instead of using this screenshot intuitively to find out how to render in high definition, she used it literally and rendered her video at the same settings as shown in the screenshot – 1080p, 60 frames per second, Blu-ray quality. Her 2.5 minute clip ended up becoming almost half a gigabyte.

#Fail

The Daily Shoot Assignment of the Day

#DS505

Make a photograph from an unusual point of view.

From the Eyes of a Fridge: This is what my refrigerator door would see if it had eyes.

So Far in 2011…

Number of Taco Bell tacos eaten: 21

Number of times I did my own laundry: 2