Experiement 3: Making & Broadcasting Movies

OK, it's time for my final experiment. So far I've created a flashy flash banner and a flash-based "product demo." My last experiment for the break is to try out some "live" video and post it to YouTube. The point of this exercise isn't to make an Oscar winning movie, but just to see what's involved. Here goes...

So, what was involved in making this major piece of cinema? It started off with trying out my Christmas present from my wife -- a new Cannon Elph SD600 digital camera. This isn't even designed as a movie camera, but most digital cameras these days have some basic video capability. I just shot a few seconds of video waving the camera around my family room.

Next, I created an account on YouTube (only took 5 minutes or so). I spent a little time looking at the instructions for uploading. They suggest an optimal format to upload is 320x240 @ 30 fps MPEG 4. My camera was initial set up to record at 640x480 @ 30 fps and it records in AVI. The first thing I noticed about this is that the resulting files are massive. AVI appears to be an uncompressed format -- I guess the little CPU in my Elph isn't up to doing on the fly MPEG compression. That meant I couldn't record more than a few seconds of video on the (incredibly small!) 16 MB SD card that came with my camera. I reset the resolution on my camera to capture video at 320x240. This helped some on size, but the files were still massive (something like 1 MB / second).

In reading some more tips on the web, it suggested good, cheap tools to edit your movies are iMovie (on the Mac) and Windows Movie Maker. I have Windows Media Center edition installed on my PC, and sure enough, there was Windows Movie Maker hiding in my start menu. I quickly imported my AVI file into the workspace for Movie Maker.

Next, I was able to drag the clip created from my AVI into the timeline view. From there I exported my clip. It allowed me to select some variables about quality and destination media. I wound up creating a .wmv file (some kind of Windows Media thing). The good news is that this was a tiny fraction the size of the AVI (like 1/6 the file size). I tried upload both the AVI and the WMV file to YouTube. It seemed to digest both fine (although uploading the AVI took much longer!).

Since, I'd gotten this far, I decided to check out some more options in the software. There was an option called "Make titles or credits." I used these to VERY quickly (like a couple minutes) create the opening title and closing credit clips. I then pulled these into the timeline and exported. Heres what it looked like:

I then uploaded this to YouTube. YouTube gave me a small piece of HTML code to embed in my page (in this case my Blog). Bang, all done. It was really quite amazing. I managed to create this stuff and get it ready to "broadcast" in less than two hours. That included learning to use my camera, the editing software, and YouTube. Now I just need to find an excuse to do something interesting. I'm also hoping some of the folks on my team here at Sun might pick up some of the tools and see what they can build with them.

Maybe I'll have to start Video Blogging. :-)

Posted at 11:04PM Dec 26, 2006 by Stephen Wilson in Personal  |  Comments[2]

Experiment 2: Flash Demo

OK, my last winter vacation experiment was making my first flash movie. I did it with an app that seems to specialize in fancy text and graphics effects. However, if you want to do a product demonstration or "how to" then you might want a different tool. I tried out a simple freeware tool called Wink. It has a really simple interface that lets you capture a set of screenshots and turn them into an annotated demo. I didn't spend a lot of timing figuring out how to demo something specific, so I just created a demo of using Google to find the Update Connection homepage.

Click here to see the sample demo.

This took less than an hour to construct (including some learning curve on the tool. I think you could create some really cool product demos with a tool like this if you were willing to put a little time into it.

Posted at 06:08PM Dec 25, 2006 by Stephen Wilson in Personal  | 

Experiment 1

Here's my first media experiment for my winter vacation.

I'm trying out an application called Koolmoves to generate flash animations. It's pretty cool. I managed to put together this little animation in about an hour without reading any instructions.

Posted at 09:51PM Dec 23, 2006 by Stephen Wilson in Personal  | 

Finally Time for a Break

It's been a crazy month at work.  This week we got through rolling out some major changes in our product direction (really exciting stuff that I'll be talking about here over the next few months, BTW!).  The reaction from the team has been really positive, but now the real work begins.

This next week I'm really going to take some downtime.  The family and I are staying in town (no big airplane trips to Grandma's house!).  In some of my spare time I intend to play with some new technology.  I used to be really into mulitmedia (that's what we used to call digital video and interactive content before anyone had heard of the Internet -- much less Web 2.0).  But, now I don't even know how to upload a video to YouTube.  I'm going to have to fix that.  Expect to see a few experiments pop up here over the break.

 Everyone have a safe holiday.  See you next year!

Posted at 07:31PM Dec 22, 2006 by Stephen Wilson in Personal  |