High def output

Got a Nikon D90 in november, really pleased with the camera so far, upgraded from the Nikon D80 and among the new features was the video capture ability. Have not used it that much yet, have been concentrating on the still photography part, but mean while I have managed to shoot a some videos from time to time.

Have uploaded videos to Youtube but it will not identify the D90 (straight out of camera) Motion JPEG format videos as HD-video and scales down the size to regular size.

Now to the dilemma, I don't have any other video editor than the Windows Movie Maker (Windows XP) and when done editing it's time to same the video, all fine so far. The Nikon D90 can capture video in 1280 x 720 format, HD-quality but when you want to save the video you done in Movie Maker there is no option to save in HD, the largest size is, among some other sizes, maximum 856 x 480 pixels!

So after some googling and some trial and error I found the quickest solution on a site called papajohn.org

I downloaded the: WMV-HighDefinition-Widescreen-1280x720 Profile
The link doesn't seem to work, until then you can also copy-and-paste following line in to a browser:
http://www.papajohn.org/Downloads/WMV-HighDefinition-Widescreen-1280x720.prx
(The whole webpage here: http://www.papajohn.org/MM2-SavingMovies-CustomProfiles.html you probably have to scroll down a bit.)

When asked where to save the file (*.prx) navigte to the c:\Program Files\Movie Maker\Shared\Profiles folder - Save the file here.

Now when you start the windows movie maker you will now get the option to same your video as WMV-HD-1280x720!



An example (double click for full-size):




Just a end note, I'm not entierly sure if it's necessary to download the Windows Media Encoder 9 Series from Microsoft to make this work but if you have trouble making it work perhaps you better install it too. Found here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads

With it you will get an Profile Editor to edit and customize your own profiles, can't understand why MS made it this hard to make your own Profiles, perhaps they, like always, try to protect you from making your own decisions. ;)