Cave Diving Videos

[PerroneFord]

As many of you are aware, this winter, I embarked on a project to bring together the best underwater cave diving videos in the world. Mostly amateur, but some professional. I chose a marvelous site called Stage6.com. Unfortunately, Stage6 ran into some difficulty and had to be shut down.

In evaluating a new home for the videos, I have settled on Vimeo.com. Vimeo has a number of advantages over Stage6 including flash video so that no one has to download a special viewer, and Vimeo seems to be faster, and is more interactive. It has a few drawbacks as well as the flash version is not quite as nice to look at as Stage6's divx files, but things are improving rapidly.

For those who would simply like to view the videos, you can do so at:

Cave Diving on Vimeo

For content creators, especially those of you working in HD, I'd love to have your video's for the site. All proper credits will be given of course. Vimeo re-encodes all HD video to 720p so you might want to provide video in that format. It re-encodes all SD video to 720x480 so if you are providing DV or SD video, you may want to stick with those sizes. PAL format videos are welcome. SECAM may be able to be used, but I have no provision for editing them.

Because Vimeo has a weekly upload limit of 500MB, I am slowly moving video over. I have enough material at this time to upload through the end of the summer, but priorities can be shifted for certain video. So go check it out, make comments on the videos, and enjoy!

-Perrone

 

[Doubles]

Perrone those are some fantastic video's! Only had time to check out a couple, but I will be watching the rest later this week.

Great idea too

Cheers

Steve

 

[Scubastud16]

Perrone,

Thanks for getting those back up! I went to Stage6 recently to watch them, and was pretty depressed when I saw that it was down!

Danny

 

[TSandM]

On my computer, the quality of these seems as good as the Stage 6 videos, but they load faster. Thanks again for taking on this work, Perrone. It's great to be able to cyberdive the caves, when I can't be there in person.

 

[PerroneFord]

I'm using every trick I know to keep the quality as high as possible. Sometimes the original videos aren't what I would like them to be, especially the stuff that's not HD, but I am doing my best.

Stage6 encoded to the DivX codec which was great quality. But it only needed to encode ONCE. I created clean video on my site, then uploaded and stage6 converted. Since Stage6 didn't have any upload limits, I was free to upload the best quality I could.

Now, I have to encode myself, upload my compressed file, and then Vimeo encodes that compressed file AGAIN, which degrades the quality. I'm pretty disappointed with that, but it's what we've got. They are working on a solution to show our original files if we encode them a certain way, which will give me direct control of the quality. Hopefully, this summer that will get worked out.

In the meantime, I am going to continue to try to bring the best quality cave videos in the world to everyone.

 

[Mike D]

Great videos!!!

 

[contender]

I'm using every trick I know to keep the quality as high as possible. Sometimes the original videos aren't what I would like them to be, especially the stuff that's not HD, but I am doing my best.

In the meantime, I am going to continue to try to bring the best quality cave videos in the world to everyone.

It shows, great job Perrone keep up the good work.

 

[willardj]

Great job Perrone! Keep it up. Are you going to upload any sidemount vid's?

 

[PerroneFord]

My first sidemount/rebreather video will be ready by 5pm Eastern today. I don't have any tight sidemount stuff though. Seems none of the tight squeeze guys want to take cameras with expensive dome ports!

 

[willardj]

Cool thank's! The open stuff is good for the learning thing. Able to watch the technique and placement's.