In an earlier posting, I discussed how YouTube could be used to do the “heavy lifting” for the bandwidth associated to online skateboard videos. I started with a short clip from the Denver skatepark recorded quite some time ago. Well here’s an example of a video we produced last year during the holidays at the Greenwood Village skate park:

Interestingly, we removed the in-home “fair use” soundtrack from the original video for the potential copyright infringement implications of placing the video on YouTube. Now here’s what is really cool. Google and YouTube have authorized the distribution of music tracks from a variety of bands looking for visibility, so you can now replace your existing audio track with something that can be legally used with your video on the web.

On Sunday September 7th, we travelled to several different skateparks in the Denver metropolitan area. We call these skateboard adventures “Great Alsup Skateboard Tours”. We typically get up early, have a hearty breakfast, jump in the car and hit a variety of skateparks. On this outing, we went to downtown Denver, Castle Rock and Redstone (Highlands Ranch).

We arrived at the downtown Denver skatepark somewhere between 8:30AM and 9:00AM. BTW: This is the best time to skate this park since it can get really crowded later in the day on weekends. One popular part of this park is the wave at the southeast corner. There are 4 or 5 humps of increasing size that allows you to build momentum for jumping obstacles. I landed 3 cones several times before we decided to go to Castle Rock for some street activity.

It’s a long drive from downtown Denver to Castle Rock, but it goes quickly because we talk about tricks and technique in the car. The Castle Rock skatepark has some good terrain to practice street tricks, like rails and stairs, without a lot of risk. I landed a back-side 180 and a pop-shove-it over the stairs and to finish the day off I finally did a boardslide on the inclined rail.

We came, we skated, we left…It was a good day!

I wanted to see if I could place a YouTube video in a WordPress blog posting so I could reduce any additional bandwidth costs of serving up large video files. I started by creating a YouTube channel called, you guessed it, SK8NE1. Then, I exported an old (i was about eight) short (15 seconds) video clip to DV format (60MB) and uploaded it using the Google Gears upload application. Here’s the result:

Note: We changed our WordPress settings to full text to see if the YouTube video above would show up in Google Reader after the ping indices were updated.

I think it looks pretty good so I may start using YouTube to do the “heavy lifting” of my skate videos. Over the next year or so I’d like to put up some short training videos on skate tricks I’ve learned over the years. Digital video files can be enormous and if I get a lot of people looking at my videos it could cost me (my dad) some bucks! Enjoy the short clip, I’ll plan to put more up soon. Please let me know what you think!