And He Blogs

Just a quick post on a new discovery - Photoshop tutorials from a deeply disturbed individual entitled “You Suck at Photoshop“. Definitely PG-13 and abusive, but very funny - and yet instructional.

UPDATE: YSAP returns for “Season 2″ on June 27!

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The world of video sharing websites is changing rapidly. YouTube and its competitors are trying to distinguish themselves by constantly improving their services, so we should see great progress in terms of quality of video and features that these sites offer. My recent quest has been to find the best options for hosted screencasts. The makers of my screencasting tool of choice, Camtasia, offer a (pay) service to host the videos at a site called screencast.com. Here you can host the higher quality, and higher resolution (larger), SWF files that really make screencasts look their best. You also can host those high quality screencasts on your own hosting service, provided you have that little extra know how to get them up and streaming. There is an SWF version of the screencast represented in the above photo available.

The latest version of Camtasia also gives the option of outputting a blog-friendly version of the screencast that works well for embedding into a blog post. However, if you want to give your screencasts a wider audience, you may want to consider YouTube or other video sharing services. Here are a few things you should know about sharing your screencasts online.

The Secret High-Quality YouTube Hack

This really isn’t a secret any more, but YouTube is experimenting with higher quality videos. YouTube announced that it would offer higher quality versions of video, one reason being so that they can accommodate the Apple iPhone and Apple TV, which don’t play Flash video. The video format that is used is a variant of MPEG-4 known as h.264. Adobe recently upgraded their Flash player to play h.264 video in addition to Flash video (FLV). The h.264 versions of the video will give the Apple TV users a more TV friendly experience because it is higher resolution.

To see the higher quality version videos on YouTube you need to add an extra little bit of text to the URL of a YouTube video. Whatever the URL is, add &fmt=18 to the end of the URL. If that doesn’t work, you can try &fmt=6. To see the screencast represented by the photo above at high quality resolution, go to:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=O-W-3OIrJKg&fmt=18

Compare that with the low quality version that is located by using the traditional URL (without the &fmt=18):

http://youtube.com/watch?v=O-W-3OIrJKg

The obvious benefit to the high quality version is that the text is much sharper. The downside is that it will take longer to download to a user’s machine (it’s roughly twice the size). You also lose a bit of the “instant seeking” ability. With a standard YouTube video (the Flash version) you can start watching at any point by moving the play head to the position that you wish. You won’t be able to do that with the h.264 version until it downloads entirely to your computer.

You can click on the images below to compare side-by-side screenshots.

Other Video Sharing Sites

I experimented superficially with some other video sharing sites, and I can recommend two that give good quality encoding of screencasts. One is Blip.tv, which is my personal favorite video sharing/TV channel service. Blip.tv’s selling point, besides the myriad of options to publish, cross-post, distribute, advertise, etc., is that they use the higher quality On2 codec for Flash video. I can also customize a player to match a given blog, and maximize the window to fit in the space that a given WordPress theme provides.

The other site that impressed me was Vimeo. This is one of the first sites to offer HD Flash video, and while I didn’t try to upload the video at HD resolutions, the video quality is quite good at the standard setting. You also can view the video full screen and while the artifacts of compression are more noticeable, you get an acceptable quality video to watch. Blip.tv has the full screen capability as well, but I couldn’t get it to work when I embedded the video in a blog post. Lots more testing yet to do, but so far some cool things out there to report. More to come.

Here is the Blip.tv version:

Here is the Vimeo version:

Install Flickr Photo Gallery Plugin in UMWBlogs from Andy Rush on Vimeo.

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A project I just finished almost requires me to blog about a few of the workflow issues. Even if no one reads this it will go down in the archives as a “reference post”, so here goes. A faculty member here at UMW wanted to put speeches that his students recorded, on YouTube, and then create posts on a UMW Blogs site. Some of the speeches were recorded in the class, and some of them were recorded in DTLT’s “studio” (in quotes because you wouldn’t call it a studio if you saw it). The faculty member’s camcorder was a digital 8mm camera (with FireWire), so those were easily captured onto “The Beast” (our PC editing station). We used a Sony wireless lavaliere microphone setup to get good audio, as opposed to the standard noisy on-board mic that camcorders have. I set up a similar scene to the classroom in our “studio”.

So my first scare was the horrible crackling sound on the audio track for the videos shot in the classroom. Thankfully it was only on a couple of videos, and only on the right audio track, so it was easily muted in Adobe Audition. I’m using Adobe Premiere CS2 so it easily integrates with Audition, and switching out audio is simple. So a couple of tips to come away with:

• Use an external microphone.
• Use headphones connected to the camcorder to monitor the sound from the external microphone.

The “studio” setup was, as I said, similar to the classroom, though I did use a different camcorder (Canon HV-20) with a less noisy microphone jack and with the ability to manually change the audio levels (couldn’t find that on the faculty’s camcorder). Things were streamlined by recording directly to the hard drive (thereby skipping the video capture step) with a piece of software called DV Rack. Formerly a Serious Magic product, now known as On Location from Adobe, it records as standard DV (.avi) files. It did a basically flawless job, though it did provide another scare as some students talked louder and horrible clipping noises were present, but only when played back within DV Rack. The noises weren’t present when I played back the video in other media players.

I was very conscious of keeping the look of the classroom when I shot the video of the students in the “studio”, so I set the camera to auto white balance. We shot the videos in a very confined space. Despite giving the students directions to look straight into the camera, there were times when a few of them looked off camera at me at the end of their video.

Once I was done editing the videos, each clip was sent through the DivX Converter program to make smaller MPEG-4 versions of the videos to upload to YouTube. With these short videos, it is no longer a requirement to get them to smaller files as YouTube now accepts up to 1GB files. From a practical standpoint, unless you have a blazing fast Internet tube, you’re better off converting to smaller files and uploading those. The CS2 version of Premiere doesn’t allow me to save out as DivX (grrr!). The CS3 version does. Hence the use of DivX Converter, a $20 program that does batch conversion and is (now) quite stable.

Finally, it’s time to upload the videos. I had prior to this only uploaded videos one at a time. Was there a multiple video uploader for YouTube like there is for Flickr? Yep! It is PC only at this point, a Mac version is announced as on its way. YouTube is well known for sucking when it comes to video quality, but it adds other flexibilities that still make it a desirable place to serve your videos. Supposedly higher quality is coming in the near future. It’s the only thing left keeping from the title of super-uber-video-sharing site of all time.

All in all, it was a valuable education in using the popular video sharing site. Nothing like shooting 9 videos, adding to that another 6 shot in the classroom, and then 2 more that were self produced, all uploaded to YouTube to give you a real world test of the pros and cons of a service. Valuable lessons were learned, or reinforced.

Next!

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‘Tis the season . . .

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One last time I’ll attempt to turn you on to the significance of what Michael Wesch from Kansas State University is trying to do. His talk at ELI 2008 in San Antonio is titled "Human Futures for Technology and Education", and his subtitle is "The Crisis of Significance". As the facilitator notes, Michael is famous for his "The Machine is Us/ing Us" video, and he continues to challenge us with more recent productions from his Digital Ethnography students.

It’s hard to summarize all of the goods points that were made in his presentation, but his central point revolves around how the classroom, and the nature of education, needs to change. If the top questions faculty are getting in their classes are "How many points is this worth?", "How long does this paper need to be?", and "What do we need to know for this test?", then that is a crisis of significance. "All learning starts with good questions" states Wesch, and if the only thing that the students are worrying about are what grade they are going to receive then there is a problem.

In fact there is so much here, and we all have so little time, I should just let you get to it right away and listen/watch for yourself.

UPDATE: None of the ELI sessions are available. Sure hope this is temporary.

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The Global Warming debate is, needless to say (but I’m saying it anyway to further this blog post), a contentious one. As Greg the Science Teacher Guy says, a more accurate term is Global Climate Destabilization. So whether you think humans are causing the planet to warm or not, or whether you even believe that the planet is even warming, this video gets a potentially important conversation going. It also frames the debate properly, not in whether the problem does or does not exist, but what are the costs or benefits to acting or not.

This video, entitled "How It All Ends" (hyperbole . . . or not?), is important not only from the global implications of the debate itself, but also because of the educational importance of science and the scientific process. This debate is what science is all about - a theory, presentation of data, peer review, skepticism, finding holes in the theory, lather, rinse, repeat.

Greg’s video makes me want to investigate more and see all the arguments for and against. I can form my opinions from people presenting evidence, but I always have more questions and I usually ask "what if they’re wrong?" Take for instance this video by the world renowned and well respected Sir David Attenborough:

Entitled "The Truth About Climate Change", it lays out (literally) the graph of the warming that’s occurring, but I’m left feeling like "that’s it, but I have so many questions?" Don’t just tell me it’s THE truth. So here’s another question. Can scientists possibly present ALL the arguments and evidence for ALL of us to be convinced one way or the other? I think this is an admirable attempt (though, as I write this I haven’t watched anywhere near all the videos) to open this debate to the public in an intelligent and scientific way. I think it’s worth my time.

Hat tip to Karl Fisch.

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I’ve talked about Professor Michael Wesch and his Digital Ethnography class at Kansas State University a couple times in the past (here, and here). His class, and especially the videos that have been produced as a result are a wonder. The good professor’s latest post is a wealth of information related to putting together a YouTube mash-up. There is so much good information here, and it starts with a link to a great tutorial on Web 2.0. More great resources include the article Recut, Reframe, Recycle from American University’s Center for Social Media. He mentions one of my favorite tools, Video DownloadHelper, a Firefox plugin that assists you in grabbing/downloading YouTube videos (and other media!). He puts a plug in for a video conversion site called Vixy.net that does media conversion. I’ve used that one, but I’ll put in my vote for another site called Zamzar that performs a similar service and adds, document, image, and audio conversion as well. He also mentions using music with a Creative Commons license, and provides Jamendo as a good place to find some CC tunes.

Read the post to see all the resources, and some of the videos that were produced in the past. Watch the video above to see a fine (and funny) example of a "movie trailer mash-up" (based on one of my favorite movies, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles). Thank you, again, Professor Wesch.

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It is interesting to watch this story unfold, but this video encapsulates the situation so well. Bill Hunt, by the way, is one of the editors at Digital Bits which I don’t read. I prefer Engadget HD’s coverage. Today they remind us not to forget that the porn industry still needs to weigh in on this

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  . . . but it would violate copyright - paraphrased from comments by Elizabeth on this post - Inside Higher Ed :: When It’s OK to Copy . So obviously we need to amend the copyright law, but before that happens, we need to sort out "fair use". The Society for Cinema and Media Studies is advocating for disambiguation of fair use in the copyright law, and working to define policies for using visual and aural materials in scholarly endeavors. More power to them and I’m glad to have discovered their site.

And now for a brilliant and hysterical review of fair use, I present "A Fair(y) Use Tale".

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For those of you who haven’t heard of Picnik, here is a little promotional video that those folks have put up on YouTube. If you store your photos online at sites like Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa Web Albums, or even Facebook, then why not use an online photo editor. The Picknik folks are doing what looks like a bit of a promotional tour (NBC and ABC networks), so I’ll help them out (again) by posting their video here, and vouching for their service. It really does work elegantly with really easy and tight integration with the above mentioned photo services. Their "premium" features are even available for free, for a limited time.

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