Growing Pains

OK I suppose I'm growing as an instructor. I'm learning new techniques for working with videos and preparing them for uploading. Again, because we started off with unfriendly hardware (Sony handicam mini dvd) this process has been a PAIN IN THE BUTT!!! Previous blog entries discussed our issues of converting the files to some format that would allow editing within Apple's imovies program. That was fate's Christmas present to me. We found a free conversion program and spent the time between Christmas and New Year's finalizing minidvds, copying to larger dvds, converting the files from vob to mp4 files and transferring the files to the mac and then uploading them into managable imovie files. Then I was able to label and sort and finally start editing these files into imovie projects.

I have spent the last month working on over 14 hours of raw footage. Through imovies I was able to condense and title small projects (still not completed movies) which I tried to keep within the 3-5 minute range. I did this for a couple of reasons. First, student attention span is not very long. Heck, I struggle with videos online that are more than five minutes long. Second, the smaller files also mean smaller file size. The intention there was to help make the upcoming finalizing and uploading process quicker. But first I had to add some transitions, adjust sound and light levels (mostly sound--lighting was still difficult) as well as adding some text and still photos to the projects. Transitions and title pages had to have time allowances set and photos may be had cropping or effects added or deleted (mac automatically uses something called the Ken Burns effect which narrows or widens a picture--sometimes effective and sometimes it cuts out valuable parts of the original still shot). So all of this was time consuming. I figured it took approximately 4 hours for 30 minutes of raw footage. But that doesn't include the uploading time...

Uploading is a beast all it's own. We experimented with several file settings. Compressing and changing standard or widescreen options, keyframes and blah blah blahs...using quicktime and sending right to youtube or converting and saving first to the desktop and then exporting to youtube. We still lost alot of quality (seemingly) which is VERY FRUSTRATING! But it's February and I've been working on these projects for what seems like forever! So I think we have to keep moving forward, there's no more time to move backward. But let me just advise anyone out there looking at creating videos, podcasts or movies for your class or just for personal use--don't use the sony handicam minidvd. The movies I made with flip videos were so much easier and ALOT less time-consuming. You may give up a little sound quality but overall that's the way I will be going in the future.

Other frustrations from this past month:
Decided to go to YOUTUBE because as recommended to me by our Dean of Technology, the mere mass volume of videos almost makes it the most reliable and tech-up-to-date. Youtube is going high definition. I found this function on some of the videos I had watched and even on a couple of our test videos. Of course, now I can't find it--what the heck?

Because I'm limiting my videos to 3-5 minutes, I have ended up with hundreds of videos. I'm trying to keep the titles focused so it will be easy recognition--but that takes a bit of organization as well. Especially since I ended up saving my work on two different mac computers. My friend has graciously allowed me to take her second mac (a laptop) home with me in order to continue my work on the projects. This meant downloading the files a second time onto another machine. This worked great in theory until I filled up all the free space on the laptop. (At least that meant I had a couple of days off!)

I also seemed to have lost a couple of videos in my imovie files. One of the larger temples we visited does not seem to be listed anywhere on either computer. I was pretty sure I remember going through pictures from there so I just don't know where they could be or what I did to lose them. Maybe it had something to do with the full computer. Who knows.

Also, the Norwegian Lutheran is coming out in me and I'm getting concerned about putting the videos out into a public forum like youtube. So I took the responsible route and called Sami (who helped arrange our trip with his sister the Egyptian travel agent/business woman) and ran the idea by him. I explained many of the videos included pictures of the Egyptologists that had been our guides and our company hosts. We had gotten their permission at the time to film for my classes. I explained the situation of where the videos would be going and got the permission to put them on youtube. So I started the uploading process. UFF DA! It is painful--but at least we're moving forward and I must be growing somehow!

Meeting with Michael and new techy ideas

Wednesday, January 28th I went into school and met with Michael Amick our Dean of Technology Services. We talked shop for awhile and here are a few sites I want to document from that meeting:

1) Speakeasy.net How fast is fast when it comes to computers? This site is a great resrource for checking upload and download speeds. Find the link that says SPEED TEST in the bottom right hand corner of the page. From there you will be asked to choose a server. Michael said he always uses Chicago (so I did too). Once you click on that it will start the testing process. You visually get to watch as a little spedometer tracks your speed of both uploading and downloading. It does so in a matter of seconds. Probably would take longer to test if you were on dial-up ;)

2)I learned about word clouds which can take a text and visually map which words are most frequently used. The more frequent the bigger and bolder the word appears in this "cloud". I immediately thought about how that would be a great second part of my hope/fear assignment.

3) Michael had shared this before but I just didn't get around to exploring it before, but I need to set up my google reader account so that the blogs I follow are pooled together.

4) Michael showed me Barry Dahl's class Web 2.0 tools for which I will sign up for. It is a self-paced course which we are supposed to navigate through before the ITC (Instructional Technology Council) Conference in Portland at the end of February. Guess I know what I'll be doing that week right before! (I tried signing in but because I have a security setting that blocks cookies, I had trouble getting in. Will have to try again).

5) We spent quite a bit of time talking about the new course I've been asked to devel on social networking. Immediately web applications like "facebook" and "myspace" come to mind, but social networking is so much more. So it was nice to talk ideas over with him. The course is scheduled for the first time for Spring of 2010 so I've got a little bit of time. Definitely need to start a resource/idea page for that. Sites we discussed that I need to look into more:

NING (an umbrella application for networking sites-pull by theme, idea or subject)

BRIGHTKITE (applicaton with iphone)

LINKEDIN

DELICIOUS (book marking websites)

TWITTER (microblogging)

DIGG

WORDPRESS

I also need to get Alfred Essa's articles on facebook hikacking. Well no better time, so let me go find it...Here it is: http://tatler.typepad.com/nose/2009/02/protecting-your-privacy-in-facebook.html

Here were 2 other articles he posted right after his facebook account was hijacked:

http://tatler.typepad.com/nose/2009/01/facebook-violates-its-own-privacy-policy.html

http://tatler.typepad.com/nose/2009/01/facebook-is-totally-insecure.html

6) I put in a request to Michael to put in a request to D2L evaluators that it would be nice to have a crossword puzzle function that word work like a quiz--developed within D2L and then self-scoring!

7)We talked about Shepard Fairey, artwork, remixing, and top-to-bottom design vs bottom-to-top design which can be equated to Wiggins and McTighe's backwards design.

8) Which leads me to the website Michael pointed out to me obamiconme.com which takes your picture or one you upload and transforms it into a poster in the style of Shepard Fairey's famous Obama Hope and Progress posters. The picture included in this blog is from that site.

It was a great day full of great ideas and not enough time to explore them all--even when on sabbatical!

Video host sites

Here's an email I received from a friend who was doing research for me on video host sites:


Video Hosting Sites

Potential Issues - Many sites will make recomendations to other videos. Sometimes the recomended videos are totally inappropriate. Additionally, many districts have decided to block sites rather then take time to figure out appropriate ways to use them. Often you can get some of these unblocked if you talk to the right people.

YouTube - Most common site, but it is blocked in many schools. If you use Google Sites then you may want to use YouTube as embedding videos into Sites from YouTube is seamless. Embedding videos from other hosts is a lot more difficult (nearly impossible).
Google Video - Also fairly common. Just like YouTube, Google Video allows you to easily embed videos into a Google Site. Go figure, the video hosts that Google owns work well with the other tools they own.
Blip.tv - This is the one I use. I can upload files in multiple formats (so users can download high quality video), it allows for easy creation of podcasts, and it will cross upload to the archive.org.
Archive.org - Site trying to archive the entire internet. This one is cool because after a video completes it does not recommend other videos. Thus avoiding a potential pitfall of using other video hosting sites with students.
Ourmedia - Partners with the Internet Archive and Blip. Free hosting of a variety of files.
Vimeo - Upload up to 500 mb/week. The original files can be made available for download.
Metacafe - All videos are reviewed before they go live. The have policies against "bad stuff".
TeacherTube - This is basically a school friendly version of YouTube. There is no limit on video length.
SchoolTube - Another school friendly alternative. This one includes some sort of vetting process. Someone (or multiple individuals) serves as an Administrator for the school and will have to approve all video uploads from your school. Videos must be shorter than 10 min.
Video Editing Sites listed above

Free Music Site

I was working on my video projects last night and wanted to find some music to play in the background of some hieroglyphic shots. Deb volunteered to do some research online. She found a site called "pacDV" at pacdv.com. According to the site's terms and conditions page about liscensing, music and sound effects may be used without a fee but they'd like the user to site their webaddress. The mp3 files can easily be added to an itunes account and slipped into an imovie project. I'm going to try it today.

Editing Continues

Some more from guest blogger Deb Jacobson

I have learned so much today my head hurts. We are now working with iMovie and we want to do a little more than simple editing. (I like simple editing – but progress can’t be stopped)

1. Separated the audio portion from the video and placed in another part of the video.
a. You can extract the sound from either the project portion or the event portion of iMovie
b. Select the clip that contains the audio you would like
c. Hold down the Command and the Shift Key and drag it to the project where you would like it.
d. Don’t worry – you can always move it.
2. Changing the level of the sound clip
a. If you would like your new sound clip to be louder than the original sound tract – you can increase its volume and decrease the originals volume or tell it to “duck” – which will automatically reduce one over the other.
3. Voice Over
a. I also experimented with voice over using my built in microphone. It worked great. The voice over becomes a separate sound clip, which can also be easily moved, trimmed, volume adjustments as the other sound clips.

Happy New Year

It is happy indeed.  I was finally able to have some working video that I could edit.  All these troubles (see Deb's guest blog entry previous to this one) is really making me appreciate the ease of the flip video even more than I did before.  But I was off and running, well, ok maybe slow-paced jogging, with my videos today.  I started working on one about 11:30 am and uploaded it around 4 pm.  Of course, we ran into a little more difficulty--but at least I have something.

Problem number came with my completed imovie created on Deb's mac and my blogger account.  It did not want to accept the movie even though it was listed as one of the "acceptable" formats on the blogger account (avi format) and under the size limit.  We ran into this problem before but that was with the video created on imovie from the flip.  Don't know why.  But it works if we download it to a flash/jump drive and then upload it to the blogger account from my pc.  So problem one solved.

Problem two however came when I tried to view the video from my blog site.  The video was there but I discovered that there is no way to enlarge the video when going through the blog entry site.  Humm...not necessarily a problem with all videos, but this particular video was on Egyptian money and the details on the bill were lost when trying to view it in a little three by two screen!  So, I posted it on youtube and linked it back to my blog entry.  Now at least students can enlarge the video using the "full screen" option (little icon next to the volume bottom on video task bar). Problem two solved...

But now the quality of the video is poor.  I don't know if it is all the converting or what.  But it's pixalated and kind of blurry.  All this Scandinavian can say about the struggles over my Egyptian videos is UFF DA!!!

So we tried saving the completed videos in different formats (quick time--which saves in avi and mp4) tomorrow we may try the "widescreen" option on the imovie setup versus the "standard" size.  So it is now after nine and we have three blog entries up with videos of at least some sort: Egyptian Money, Egyptian Expressions, and Accommodations.  I'll keep you posted!

Video Editing Update--A Nightmare Explained

Guest blogger--Deb Jacobson recounts the struggles we encountered trying to find a way to make the Sony mini DVD videos usable.

Struggle??  I don't know what Kari is talking about - it was a piece of cake.  Ok - maybe not!  The game plan was to make some videos using iMovie from footage taken with a Sony Handicam DCR-DVD 301.  Sounds simple.  First obstacle -I have an iMac with a side transfer CD/DCD drive which you can not use mini DVDs.  Oh, sorry that wasn't the first obstacle.  We were going to hook up a firewire directly to the camera to make the transfer.  The camera doesn't support a firewire - but has a USB transfer but that doesn't work to the Mac.  We even traveled 60 miles to talk with some "experts" but they were not that helpful.   So back to the disks.   I have copying equipment so we made copies of the mini-discs to regular size discs so that I could load them into my Mac.  The file format from the mini-discs is VOB.  Which of course is not compatible with iMovie.  So the search began for software to convert the files to something we could use - such as Mp4 or avi  We searched the web and read a lot of forums from people who had the same problems and they suggested a number of free and inexpensive downloads  - such as: DVDZip, AVS Video Converter, MPEG2 Works Manager, 3VX, ffMpegx, and Handbrake.  I pretty much tried them all and the closest we came was it would work for one file but the next file would not have synchronization with audio and video.  It was a frustrating learning experience.  A lot of the problems came with me the operator.  I am not up with all the ins and outs of video conversion - and it is very possible that any of those programs could have been our solution - but they were our nemesis.  It was in reading information in documentation for Handbook (after that program failed me) that I read about MPEG Streamclip.  So what the hey - I downloaded it and IT WORKED.  I was able to easily select the VOB file, it checked for any time differences and  downloaded it - then I simply selected to export it as a Mp4 movie and now we can work with it in iMovie as well as Final Cut Express.  After a lot of frustration Kari is now learning iMovie (more frustration) and has already made two movies for her class.  So the end does justify the means.