Tuesday, May 09, 2006

New Toy

The Sony-Ericsson K750i camera phone I bought a few days ago (see previous blog) is proving pretty addictive. It's just too easy to take quick home movies, although the resolution is very poor. The subsequent process is slightly messy.

1. The movie is transferred to the PC, emulating a USB drive - in .3gp format.

2. I then map it to .avi using the tool I bought (previous post).

3. I then import this into Windows Movie Maker, which allows the weird multi-clip format from the camera phone to be smoothed out into one movie, with title if required. This is saved in .wmv format (no choice! That's why Microsoft develped the tool for free).

And then the home movie is inflicted on anyone I misguidedly believe might be interested. Strange that you can know this, and still do it.

By putting the movies on my website (a minute comes in just under 5 MB) at least I send a link rather than the file. And Windows Media Player buffers and plays on download, rather than waiting for the entire file to be downloaded, so it's almost like streaming ...

No, I can't resist ... our visit last week-end to Wardour castle, destroyed in the English civil war - here at 1.8 MB (30 seconds).