|
Home | Blog Index | Blog Archives | Christianity & Faith Essays | Storm Chasing Essays
May 8 lightning
|
In September of 2025, my work is generating the most income it ever has in my career. Yet, I'm being forced to shut down my successul operation, against my will, due to one cause alone: 95% of that revenue is being stolen by piracy and copyright infringement. I've lost more than $1 million to copyright infringement in the last 15 years, and it's finally brought an end to my professional storm chasing operation. Do not be misled by the lies of infringers, anti-copyright activists and organized piracy cartels. This page is a detailed, evidenced account of my battle I had to undertake to just barely stay in business, and eventually could not overcome. It's a problem faced by all of my colleagues and most other creators in the field. |
With gas at $3.70/gallon, zero-mile chases are always nice. A few small storms were able to put some very limited instability to good use over Charleston this afternoon. Lightning was frequent, but not that impressive. I did manage to catch one strike from my living room window.
Click for 528p HD clip
I've been shooting the majority of my weather footage in 1080i high-def since October of 2005, but due to the enormous file sizes needed, I haven't been posting them online in HD format. However, I upgraded to Premiere CS3 last month, and in playing around with it I've found that its new HD Windows Media encoder is pretty efficient. The video above is downconverted from 1080i source to 720p WMV-HD, yielding a file less than 8 megs for a 17-second clip. That's not a bad file size for web purposes, and the quality is OK. The drawback is the 3.6mbps variable bitrate I'm using won't stream well if your internet connection's down speed is slower than that (so the file will need a longer buffer time). So from now on, I'll be posting future videos in 720p HD. Full 1080 files are still too big/processor intensive for most visitors' computers and monitors - but in the next year or so that will change as more people upgrade their systems.
I'll probably post a few clips from the past in this HD format in coming days.
|
