Dear fellow mappers,
It is possible now to upload to the Wikimedia Commons the videos
which illustrate Wikipedia articles. On Saturday I went to the
highest summit of the Swiss portion of the Jura mountains, Mont Tendre
, and filmed a short, 4 minutes, video about it.
Then I added this video to the respective Wikimedia category and
to the Wikidata page, and added wikidata=* and wikimedia commons=*
tags to the OSM node of the summit:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/
I used for filming the cameras Sony RX100 V and DJI Osmo, and for the aerial footage the latest DJI Phantom 4 Pro+ quad-copter. The Wikimedia accepts videos in the free open WEBM format, so I converted the MP4 file into WEBM with the ffmpeg command line tool.
The quality of the resulting WEBM video:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/
is comparable with its Youtube version:
The DJI Phantom 4 Pro+ has got a camera with one inch image
sensor and improved lenses. In my opinion, it is the first
aircraft of this class capable to film really useful aerial photos
and 4K aerial videos. Creating a good video is not a trivial task,
still there is a lot of information on it, and the quality
equipment is readily available.
And it is kind of interesting. In fact, we could climb on the
Mont Tendre only from the third attempt. Two first attempts failed
due to the snow, wind, low outside temperature, and the remoteness
of a location (it is also the most isolated mountain of the canton
of Vaud), besides we had to carry the equipment. Probably, I would
never did it in winter, if it were not for filming.
A video may convey much of significant information about a
location. It may provide not only ground and aerial footage, but
also some practical advice and insights via a microphone. Perhaps,
in future we may think about creating a video=* key for direct
linking to the videos with a Creative Commons license. But even
now it is possible to do it via wikidata=* and
wikimedia_commons=*.
With best regards,
Oleksiy