Earth Hour, YouTube, and Web 2.0

We had a big media blitz for Earth Hour here in Canada this year, and I decided to do my part and shut off all lights and appliances for an hour on March 29th. This I did.

But I did run one electrical device: my camcorder. I put my trusty ol’ Canon Ultura on my tripod and parked it in front of my balcony window to capture the beginning and end of Earth Hour. I used my Canon wide-angle adaptor (similar to this but not the same model) on the Ultura to make sure I got as much of the landscape as possible, so the balcony railing and the ceiling above it are both curved—but I caught a much wider angle than I would have otherwise.

I captured it the next morning to my hard drive, used Final Cut to edit it, and sent it through Compressor to prepare it for YouTube. I sped the footage up to 1000%, so each minute of video became 1.7982 seconds. I must admit I was impressed with Final Cut’s abilities to do so—with frame blending, it became seamless. Watching the headlights of cars showed how smooth Final Cut can be.

Here’s the video:



You’ll see someone slide the screen door open and then the balcony door several times—if I do this again, I’m putting a moratorium on going out on the balcony until after the camera’s shut off!

After I’d rendered and exported the video to QuickTime, I used a Compressor preset I’d obtained from Ken Stone’s website. The tutorial you’ll find there (by Brian Gary) is quite thorough, and I’ve been really impressed with the quality after YouTube finishes rendering. One thing to remember—you can ignore title-safe and action-safe as your entire video ends up on YouTube.

As I was waiting for Compressor to finish rendering, I wondered what the world in front of my balcony looked like on video on any other night—would it be a noticeable difference? So 24 hours after Earth Hour, I shot more video, with the camcorder in approximately the same spot.

I captured the subsequent night footage, sped it up and exported it to QuickTime as before. Then I brought both clips into Motion, where I planted them side-by-side with a background and text to try to make things clearer. I considered doing a wipe back and forth between the two clips, but side-by-side made the most sense for quick ‘n’ dirty video. I sent it through Compressor and then uploaded it.



As of tonight (April 1), the first video has 137 views and the second has 98. Some people have added comments, the “honors” link shows that the videos were in the top videos for their category, and I feel I’ve made a small contribution to the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Interestingly, the first video I put up, Hotdog, has gone from my 3 test viewings to 22 views since the other videos first appeared. I have no idea how anyone wathcing environmental videos would respond to Hotdog’s somewhat scatological bent….

I have had some time to think about the impact of these videos given the comments people have made—there was a 2-person mini-debate about global warming in the 2nd one—and I think I should have made clearer that I was shooting a great swath of residential space, where streetlights from a few major roads as well as row upon row of residential streets, dominate the landscape. The busiest stretch of highway in North American, the 401, crosses just below the horizon as well, so a lot of those lights were not part of Earth Hour. If I’d been able to shoot the skyline from my tiny bathroom window, I would have cpatured the CN Tower and the bank towers downtown going dark, as well as parts of Riverdale and the Beaches. So, in hindsight, I would have put in captions or title cards to put things in context—I didn’t intend the comparison video to present Earth Hour in a negative light (no pun intended).

If I’m still in this apartment a year from now, I’m definitely repeating the experiment and I’ll post all 4 videos for comparison.