MR2 Championship

It's the Steve Lumley show!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N6d09y1h4Ag

Can I nominate myself for the best supporting role?

PS. Patrick, what am I doing wrong with my video downloading? When I watch it on TV the quality is as good as yours on YouTube, but when I download it it's pants. Which format should I be selecting? I can't do the Hi-Res because I think YouTube's limit is 50 megs or something like that?

I think it's less what you're doing wrong and more what I'm doing right. I use two Sanyo Xacti High Definition camcorders - a HD800 facing forwards and a HD700 facing rear. You can pick the HD700 up brand new for ~£135. They're solid state so they record directly onto SDHC card and in a format you can pull straight into your editing program (or if you've got the bandwidth - upload immediately to YouTube). Both cameras record in 720p and the images are pin sharp on a 40" TV. I edit the videos in their native formats and then compress them down using the default 720P 25fps option for WMV. 10 minutes of HD footage then works out at around 500MB and YouTube will allow up to 2GB. The codec I use seems to translate favourably on their servers and I end up with what looks like broadcast quality over the internet! I think I just lucked out with my choice of camcorder. Anthony runs the same model (and bought his first).

Just to add to Patrick's post - all I have been doing recently is simply cutting out the most boring bits of footage by using the cameras built in basic editing capability. I just copy the original source file onto my PC and provided the length of the file is less than 11 minutes I then just upload it directly onto YouTube in it's original native AVCHD 720p HD format. I also stream it to my PS3 to watch on my 42" plasma TV (note that's 2" bigger than Patrick's TV). And as Patrick nearly said - I did all the resurch identifying the best camera to use in a race car and he just followed my lead, a bit like on the race track really