Rose Cantine

Here’s a short video clip I took with my new Nokia N93 video phone at Kim Thanh, a Vietnamese restaurant on Geary and Jones in San Francisco. My friends, Gabriel Amaya and Glen Bolosan, are raving about the seafood (baked salted crab). Kim Thanh is one of the best Vietnamese restaurants in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their specialty is seafood. Our favorites are the baked salted crab, baked salted shrimp, steamed fish (with ginger and scallions) and sauteed pea sprouts.

Kim Thanh
607 Geary Street (at Jones)
(415) 928-6627
San Francisco, CA94102

Video blogging

Shooting video is tricky. You realize two important things: light (of which there was too little in this restaurant) and sound (of which there was too much, in the background). I’m not about to carry a flashlight in my handbag to illuminate my subjects just in case, on the off chance, I decide to “video blog”. I will limit myself to shooting video in bright sunlight. The second problem is the size of the video clip. This clip is 25 megabytes even though it’s only 1 minute 15 seconds. I guess I won’t be sending this as an attachment to an email. I could have edited it down to a smaller size but then I spent a lot of time looking for a suitable video editor. Most are so cumbersome to use.

So I posted the clip to YouTube. The process takes a only a few minutes.
A word about video cameras: The Nokia N93, like its predecessor, the N91 is a beautiful device. The N93 is even more stylish, but too bulky to stick in your trouser pockets. Read the Engadget review here.

The N93 allows you to edit the clip so that the file is much smaller and then send it to friends via GPRS. In this case, the phone compressed my 25 megabyte MPEG-4 file to about 283 kilobytes. I like this video camera/phone very much because it is easy to use.