March 27, 2005
Montauk
This is a video about nothing. I went to Montauk. The weather was good. The mic on my little camera picked up a lot of wind noise though.
Here's Jay Dedman's videoblog post in the Redwood Forest that I mentioned.
I'm tagging this entry at Technorati: videobloggingweek2005
Also tagged at MeFeedia: videobloggingweek2005
Posted by jkinberg at 12:12 AM | Comments (8)
March 25, 2005
More fun with captions
After experimenting with captions yesterday using MAGpie, I decided to give it another go. But this time I used the exported files from MAGpie as a template to create caption text and a SMIL movie by hand in BBEdit. This proved to be relatively quick and easy. It was actually a little easier than using MAGpie becuase I could scrub around the clip with Quicktime player and roughly estimate the timecode points to mark the beginning of each caption segment.
I also realized that SMIL doesn't like it when you overlay a text region on top of a video region. It tends to distort the video in strange ways. This sucks because I wanted to keep the movie size at 320 x 240, but instead had to tack the text region onto the bottom making the height a non-standard 275 pixels.
Lastly, it seems MAGpie inserts quite a bit of unnecessary code in the caption file which I cleaned up by hand. In the previous video, the placement of the captions seemed to jump around a little bit, but in this movie the captions are consistently in the same spot.
In total, it took me about 30 minutes to create this SMIL movie and caption file based on the 30 second video I created previously.
Posted by jkinberg at 4:19 PM | Comments (0)
Fun with captions
After some discussions on the videoblogging group regarding accessibility and video captioning, I decided to see how difficult it would be to add captions to an existing movie clip. I used an old clip that Andrew Baron and I created before he started Rocketboom. Its a little strange to use this clip for captioning though, since the audio and video tracks purposely don't sync up.
While there are many expensive, high-end tools for captioning video, there seem to be few examples of free software to do the job... until Michael Verdi recommended MAGpie, a free, cross-platform, java-based application.
I decided to give it a try. Its a little buggy, but what do you want for free? My biggest annoyance was that video playback was rather tempermental. I often had to stop and restart the clip from the beginning after each edit I made to the caption text.
MAGpie basically creats a SMIL file. However, it did not correctly format SMIL for Quicktime. Once I exported the project file, I had to open it in BBEdit to change a few things. Specifically, I added "SMILtext" to the top of the document, changed the file extension from .smil to .mov, and edited the src attributes so they would be absolute links to my Quictkime movie and QT text track once I uploaded everything to my webserver.
In total, this took roughly 2 hours to add captions to approximately 2 minutes of video.
Posted by jkinberg at 12:29 AM | Comments (1)
March 20, 2005
Living and Recording
I shot this video with my Canon Powershot S410 digital still camera. Edited with iMovie in about an hour. Took roughly another half hour to get my compression settings to work correctly (it kept dropping the audio at the end of the clip, so I had to add the fade out with the title at the end).
Its just a little rant on my favorite subject these days... videoblogging.
I noticed too that I make kind of an over-the-top statement at the end -- that the "line of professionalism doesn't mean anything anymore." This is obviously not true. It does mean something... but it doesn't mean as much as it used to.
I'll probably never be able to make videos on par with mainstream media -- I don't have the time, money, training, or equipment. But I can make stuff that's good enough for me and more than likely good enough for people to watch. I could certainly learn how to better edit and compress video, or how to smooth out the audio so that it doesn't make subtle popping sounds between edits. These are elements that a professional might notice right away to point out to me that the line of professionalism means a lot more than I give it credit for.
But the barrier aint what it used to be, and that's an extremely cool thing.
Posted by jkinberg at 8:50 AM | Comments (4)