The drought has broken - rather violently!

[maewyn_2]

We had a "little" storm this afternoon...

After almost four months of extremely dry weather, we learned this week that a thunderstorm had been forecast for today. The "Weather Tracker" on my computer had been sending out storm warnings throughout the day. At around 4.00 pm I heard thunder. Then "thunk, thunk, thunk". I looked out the window and

Comments

[mechtild]

I love storms, Maewyn, as long as they don't drown people and wreck the land. I hope your garden wasn't devastated. It doesn't look like any trees or big limbs were down from your last photo, which is a good thing.

Beautiful double rainbow shots!

Question: how did you get that video into your post? I take it it's from your own computer, downloaded from your camera, but is it hosted by some special site and linked, or Scrapbook, or what? Thanks, Maewyn.

[maewyn_2]

My garden is not in a good shape at the moment, and it has nothing to do with the storm!

We've reached the end (hopefully!) of a long, hot, dry summer. Believe me, you wouldn't like to go out there to do any gardening over that time of the year! It's getting to the stage where it's driving me mad. The grass is overgrown in the area where I don't want it to grow, and it's dead where it should be growing! Roll on the Easter break, so that we can get in there and clean it all up!

I uploaded the video to Photobucket from my computer. I had a bit of trouble embedding it into my post. I had to post it from Photobucket to LJ rather than bringing it in from Photobucket. I had another video I wanted to add, but it was getting too late on a work night to muck around with it!

[mechtild]

Good luck on the clean-up. Sounds like a good deal of toil.

I will have to look up "embedding" on the FAQ. I don't know a thing about it, although I have seen YouTube videos stuck into people's posts that way.

When you say you had to "post it from Photobucket to LJ", rather than "bringing it in from Photobucket", aren't those the same things? Doesnt' Photobucket host the images or video files and you "bring them in" or "post" them using a link? I don't understand.

[maewyn_2]

Normally when I post pictures, I go to Photobucket, click on "direct link" on the photo I want to post, copy, then go to LJ and paste it in via the picture icon. When I tried to do that with the video, it just showed the link and not the video.

Then I opened the video in Photobucket and clicked on "share". It shows options to post to Facebook, Twitter and Myspace. Across on the other side it says "share to other sites". There you can see the LJ pencil icon. Click on that, then on the Live Journal button. It then says "automatically post to Live Journal". Type in your user name, password and title, and enter.

Voila! Posted!

I actually did this while I was giving you the instructions! You should be able to see the second video that I didn't get a chance to post last night!

[mechtild]

Thanks, Maewyn. I'm going to copy and paste your instructions into an email to myself. But can you move it around? How does it know *where* in your LJ, or even within a post, you want the embedded file to be? Maybe it says all that when one is doing it. I suppose there's a file size blurb, too. Surely you can't post just any video, but only one's smaller than a certain size.

[maewyn_2]

It automatically posts to your journal as if you had opened a new journal page and typed into it. You can edit (as I just did with the one I just posted) afterwards, but the video is the entire post. I would much prefer to embed it into the middle of a post like I do with pictures, but it just wouldn't work for me last night. I'm sure I've done it that way before.

There may be a size limit, but I didn't have any problem posting them. The video in this post was 61 megabytes. The second one (in the next post) was 71.2 megabytes. Because of their size, they took a LONG time to upload! I made the mistake of uploading both of them at the same time. It took nearly 2 hours!

[mechtild]

Thanks. Those are nice clear instructions.

As to the size limit, I should probably check that before trying it. I think you sprang for Photobucket's paid account, no? I think I let mine lapse, once I knew I wouldn't be posting much in there anymore, not the way I did when I was doing those years of screencap entries.

I say that because with recent art manips Photobucket reduced the images I posted, images the size of files I'd used in past art manips. I looked back at those older manips and saw the images had shrunk. I think there must have been a larger pixel allowance when I had a paid account.

So I went back through the manips and took out the Photobucket links for those files and reposted and relinked them from Scrapbook, which still takes much bigger files (I don't typically link from Scrapbook just because it's not as easy as doing it from Photobucket).

But TWO HOURS!!!!!!!!!!!!!! That is a *long* time!

[maewyn_2]

You could be right. I hadn't thought of size limits and whether a person was a free of paid member.

I just tried to open Photobucket to check, but they seem to be having some kind of problems, so I'll look later.

[mechtild]

The video I told you about in my email, that I loaded to Photobucket then posted in a practice post, what happened was that the video was compressed (or whatever it's called). The original 35 second movie is crisp and clear, but the version that played in Photobucket was a lot less so. Perhaps it does that to all videos uploaded, but maybe it reduces the size of non-paying subscribers, in the same way it reduces the size of their still images. I noticed Mews posted a very cool film from YouTube of choral singers, but the quality of the film was excellent. I assume that's because YouTube, not Photobucket, was hosting the file.

[maewyn_2]

Was the video you were talking about the "cat video for the cat fans"? I received the email notification, but when I tried to open it I received the 404 error "page not found" message.

Re size limits, this is what I copied from Photobucket:

Free accounts include:

•A custom URL for your default album

•Up to 500 MB of storage space for images and video clips

•Up to 10 GB of monthly traffic.

•No file size limit for images with a display size up to 1024 x 768 pixels (typically a 17” monitor size) because these images are resized to meet the Photobucket constraints. There is no pixel limit, if a file size limit is chosen.

•Uploaded videos of 10 minutes or less in play length and 500 MB or less in file size. Videos longer than 10 minutes are truncated to meet the Photobucket time constraints.

It doesn't say anything about reducing resolution. I noted that paid accounts have the same size limits for videos. Perhaps you could send them an email asking about it?

[mechtild]

Thanks so much for finding this info on their site, Maewyn. I used to be able to find it easily, but since they changed things around - not just this time but the time before last, lol - I've had trouble finding things

[maewyn_2]

I couldn't find the help file at first. Then I scrolled down to the bottom of the page...

It's disappointing that you had problems with the quality of your video. Mine had degraded a bit on the transfer to Photobucket, but still managed to look reasonably good.

Perhaps another video hosting site might work better for you. Good luck!

[mechtild]

Yes, your movie looked fine. However I've never seen the original to which it could be compared. :) Thanks for the guidance finding the Help button at Photobucket. :) :) :)