As some of you know, I put down a deposit on a Smart Car several months ago.  The Smart Car is coming to the U.S.A. early next year, after nine years in Europe and other countries around the world (apparently, we aren't first in everything).  I fell in love with these cars on trips to France and Italy and have wanted one ever since. 

The smartusa folks have been on a tour with the cars around the country and I was invited to the San Jose stop.  They had three cars to drive, all European versions.  The U.S version will have slightly more power when it arrives.  I arrived a little before my time slot and got in line (about 15 people were ahead of me).  It was very much like a ride at Disneyland:  standing in a serpentine line with cars arriving every so often.  Then drivers would get out and new drivers would get in.  Then about five minutes of circulation and the ride was over.  I was tempted to get back in line after my drive.

The Smart Car name is normally shown in all lower case by the manufacturer but I have capitalized it here to make it a little easier to read.  The Smart Car was originally a joint venture between Swatch (yes, the watch company) and Mercedes Benz and the name 'smart' is an acronym for Swatch Mercedes ART.  Swatch has since dropped out of the project but Mercedes continues to be the manufacturer; albeit, Smart Cars are built in France.  The body panels are some type of plastic and are replacable with other colors and even panels with artistic designs.  The engine is a one liter three cylinder with about 71 HP.  Dry weight is around 1650 lbs.  Top speed is electronically limited to 90 MPH.  The demo guys said they had been averaging in the high 40 miles per gallon.  There are three models:  Pure, Passion, and Passion Cabrio (convertible) and prices are roughly $12K, $14K, and $17K.   

The transmission is the most interesting part of the drive train.  It is a five speed manual with an electically operated clutch.  There is no clutch pedal.  When you come to a stop, the transmission shifts into first gear and the clutch disengages.  When you step on the gas, the clutch engages.  It can also be put in a mode that shifts automatically but it is still a manual transmission because it has a clutch and not a torque converter.  You can manually shift with either the floor mounted shifter or paddle shifters on the steering wheel.  For the floor shifter, flick it forward to upshift and back to downshift.  Using the paddles, right paddle upshifts and left paddle downshifts - just like a Ferrari ;-)  I used the paddles but the turn signal got in the way of my fingers when using the left paddle; I'll have to practice my technique.

Anyway, I got to the front of the line, took my spin around the neighborhood, and was back in a flash.  On the route they made me drive, I couldn't get up to 40 mph and I was in second gear most of the time.  But it was still a lot of fun.  Unfortunately, I have to wait about six months before I have one of my very own.  I have ordered a Red Passion Cabrio with Black frame trim.  Anybody who wants a ride can stop by - one at a time.

My video is a little shaky; I need to practice my technique.  But you should be able to get the idea.

Here is my goal:  start with video produced by my camcorder in MPEG4/H.264 format, add a title page with a couple of transitions, export it to SWF format for easy viewing on the web (hopefully with a progressive download).  This goal should be accomplished for a moderate investment which I arbitrarily define as under $300.

I already have Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0, so that was my first trial.  It is very easy to add titles and transitions to my video but the export options are limited.  Most exports are to lower resolution formats and I want to retain the original 640 X 480 format.  I am able to export to Flash FLV format at the correct resolution though rendering was fairly slow.  I looked long and hard for a utility to convert the FLV to the more usable SWF format.  I settled on FLV & SWF Toolbox from Eltima Software and purchased this program, albeit prematurely.  Though FLV & SWF Toolbox creates a nice SWF file, it cannot be progressively downloaded; the viewer must wait for the entire file to be downloaded before the video is displayed in the browser.  It was not a particularly noticable problem with my short test videos but when I converted my three minute video (with sound) of the White Water Safari, the delay was significant, even with my 10 Mbps download speed.  Another problem with FLV & SWF Toolbox is that it always sets the SWF file to repeat.  When I inquired if there is a way to disable repeat, I was told that it would be an option in a future version.  So I am the not so proud owner of (yet another) piece of software that really won't be useful to me.

I also tried using Adobe Flash 8.0 to convert the FLV to SWF.  I had very mixed results with this approach and eventually abandoned Flash 8 as a tool for this project.  It would be nice it Adobe Premiere and Adobe Flash worked better together, but I know they come from different parts of Adobe and it is obvious - maybe some time in the future.

Magix MovieEdit Pro 12 was my next try.  I downloaded MovieEdit Pro because their feature list mentioned output to Flash format (don't know if that is FLV or SWF).  Installed and fired it up.  It cannot read .MP4 (H.264) - therefore useless for me.  Uninstalled - very quick evaluation!

Ulead VideoStudio 11 was next on my list.  Another download and install.  The user interface is a little unusual but I could get used to it.  Imported my MPEG4 with no problem.  Easily added a title.  Lots of output options; I chose MPEG4 for iPod 640X480 which is essentially the same as my original video clip except for the addition of a title and compression.  It worked okay, so I then converted the output to SWF using Sothink Video Encoder for Adobe Flash.  The original clip was about a minute long and 25 MB in size.  The resulting MP4 file was only 17 MB in size so some compression has occurred.

Success!  The MP4 ouput from Ulead Video Studio was fed to Sothink Video Encoder and resulted in a 12 MB SWF file and a small HTML file for setup.  I uploaded these to the server and the playback works just as I wanted.  Playback is immediate, size is 640 by 480, there is a nice control bar at the bottom of the video.  The VideoStudio rendering was much quicker than Premiere Elements though it is not an exact comparison.

Mission Accomplished.  Sothink Video Encoder for Flash was $45 and Ulead VideoStudio 11 was $99.99, so I came in well under my budget for this project.  Here is the White Water Safari video resulting from this combo.  This video sometimes stalls at the very beginning - clicking the link again usually gets it going.  I think I know what might be wrong so I will fiddle with it a bit to make it more reliable.

I bought a new camcorder recently, a Sanyo Xacti VPC-E1. It is a relatively simple camera but has one very important feature - it is waterproof to a depth of five feet. I wanted to record some of our upcoming Tahiti vacation and thought it would be nice to shoot some snorkeling video as well as have a camera that could be used in various wet environments. Five feet isn't very deep but I guarantee it is deeper than I will get. It got it's baptism recently when I accompanied my grandchildren and their parents on the White Water Safari at Six Flags Discovery Kingdom. The camera and I got soaked but the camera worked fine.

The Sanyo VPC-E1 is about the size of a deck of cards and weighs about 9 ozs. ready to go. It records to SD media and can use the new SD-HC (High Capacity) media. It has a small amount of internal memory as well. I purchased a Transcend 8GB card with a class 6 speed. The way I read the instructions, class 2 speed was probably adequate but I wanted to be safe. At the VPC-E1's highest resolution, 640 by 480 at 30 frames per second, the 8 GB SD card will hold about five hours of video. The battery is Lithium-Ion and is removable. The camera comes with an external charger for the battery. A protective wrap-around cover is also supplied. There is a bundle of software included, the most useful of which is Adobe Premiere Elements (version 3.0).

There is no eyepiece viewfinder, only the flip-out 2.5 inch LCD screen. The camera can take video or 6 mega-pixel stills; there is a separate button for each. There is a built-in flash for use with the still camera feature. The zoom is only five to one; pretty good for the still side of the camera but not outstanding compared to most camcorders. There is built-in image stabilization for those of us with shaky hands.

All things considered, it is a fine little camcorder for someone who is not too serious about their video creation. The waterproof capability adds a fun factor to this little camera. The Sanyo VPC-E1 was $467 from Amazon.com. The 8GB SD-HC card was an additional $74 from NewEgg.com and a spare battery added $17.

Since this is my first foray into putting video on the web, I had some decisions to make and some tasks to perform. The VPC-E1 creates video in the MPEG-4 H.264 format (same as used by video-capable iPods). You can't just post an MP4 file on the web and expect people to be able to view it - you need a special viewer or you need a different format.

First stop was to take a look at what Adobe Premiere Elements could do for me (without reading the manual, of course). It is a very usable piece of software and I quickly figured out how to add a title screen and a few transitions. It also can export to a variety of formats. Most of the export formats were not a good match for my 640 by 480 TV format, plus I wanted people to be able to view the videos without installing additional software. I tried making a QuickTime movie but had to fiddle with the setup to get it up to 640 by 480 (best default resolution was 320 by 240).

While most people probably have the Apple QuickTime plug-in installed in their browsers, I think it may not be universal. Why not do what YouTube does, convert the video to Flash. Premiere Elements can export to Flash (.FLV) format and has a nice default of 640 by 480 at 30 FPS. So I rendered another copy of the video to FLV and uploaded it to the server. Oh, you can't view an FLV file with the Flash plug-in; you need the video fo be in .SWF format (ShockWave). Premiere doesn't do SWF (don't know why not, since Adobe owns Flash). So I fished around on the internet for an FLV to SWF converter. My son, Alec, likes the Sothink Video Encoder and I like it too, but it wants to render the MP4 to SWF and I already had the FLV file rendered so why burn more CPU cycles?

Eltima Software makes the SWF & FLV Toolbox which will, among other things, convert FLV to SWF and includes a nice little self-hiding viewer control panel in the SWF file. Plus, it only takes a couple of seconds to perform it's magic. The Toolbox does have a peculiar interface but it seems competent at it's job. So the end result of this multi-step process is an SWF file on the server that can be viewed via a link like this (White Water Safari) or directly, if I choose to give the filename to someone in an Email or something like that.

Update 8/20/2007

The links to the videos actually show results from part 2 of this article.