A walkabout on video

A screensnap showing the video stream from Paul as walks around the volcano view point.

A clip showing the view point area at the top of the volcano beside a crater with venting gases (Video - 4.2MB).(video capture from screen)

Here’s a clip showing the video stream stretched to it’s limits when Paul goes walkabout with the camera. We’re using MPEG-4 video and in this clip the resolution of Paul#s camera was set to half PAL (320 x 240 pixels) with a frame rate of 5 frames per second and a constant bit rate of 200Kbps. Between key frames the MPEG-4 encoder sends the changes between consecutive frames. This means that when there is a lot of movement the image quality can drop as more information needs to be sent for each frame. In this clip we can see lots of examples where the quality drops while the camera is moving, but as Paul pauses on an object the quality of the image improves.