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Friday, May 9, 2008 - 2:21PM

Going HD! Blog/site video tests

By DAN ROBINSON

Editor/Photographer

From Dan: How the crime of copyright infringement took $1 million from me and shut down my operation.

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.

Update 11:52PM Friday: Added a couple more HD clips from past chases (see below).

Although I technically 'went' 1080i HD with my footage acquisition in 2005, I haven't been able to display it on the web in actual HD due to limitations in technology. But thanks to ever-increasing broadband speeds, better software and faster computers, that has changed - and I've finally got a finished system now for posting high-definition videos to the web.

I prefer embedding video into web pages rather than direct-linking to files, since it's more search-engine friendly, less likely to be hotlinked/lifted, and I can keep the Google ads above the video (I need all the extra gas money I can get to keep doing this!). Unfortunately though, 1080i videos and even 720p videos are too wide to fit into a standard 1024 design layout. So, the compromise was to create a slightly smaller preset export format in Premiere for a 944x528 HD WMV file that will fit inside this blog's layout (with the left and right sidebars removed). I kept the same bitrate as the 720p clips, which means that the 528p clips should be a little higher in quality. With the CS3 upgrade and this new process, it will now be just as easy for me to post HD clips to the web as the old standard-definition process was. So consider this blog and the stormhighway.com web site to be 'officially' HD!

Here are a couple of older clips re-encoded in the new format:

HD EXPEDITION VIDEO: November 15, 2005: Intense lightning near Griffin, IN

HD EXPEDITION VIDEO: April 23, 2007: Tornadoes in Protection, KS

HD EXPEDITION VIDEO: February 12, 2006: Cathedral Falls in snow - Gauley Bridge, WV

HD EXPEDITION VIDEO: May 8, 2008: Lightning in Charleston, WV

HD EXPEDITION VIDEO: March 8, 2008: Icy car crashes on tape - Charleston, WV

I like it. Nice quality. Good job.
- Posted by Beau Dodson

Thanks Beau - I appreciate the link on the stormreport.com site!
- Posted by Dan R. from Charleston, WV