I’m currently on a two-month visit to Cambridge in a Microsoft funded project, where we focus on the broad topic of “domesticating search”. The project has only started and we’ll organise a ‘project-in-a-day’ workshop next week in order to focus the project.
Some day during the Spring I pressed the button ‘upgrade automatically to WordPress 3.0′ and proved to be a mistake. Something went wrong, and I lost my blog. Now I had time to put it up and running again. Hope to post something soon.
I seem to have been too tired last night trying out the post-processing of the screen recording. The Streamclip (by Squared5) seemed to do make the file into some 7% (138 MB) of the original file size (1.92 GB) by the Quicktime screen recording. And actually the 138 is already usable for the purpose without additional processing.
In sum, my recommendation for a simple and free way to make screen recordings is this:
And then, of course, upload the file whereever you want.
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Today I tried to make a video tutorial for our researchers while using Apple Quicktime X‘s screen recording feature. I wired myself with a mic and started recording. When all was recorded I began to figure out how to make it useful for our researchers, who come later to see the instructions. This wasn’t too easy and I’m still working on it.
I started by trying to import the video clip, which appeared to be a “usual” .mov file, into the Final Cut Express (FCE) that I got recently. I was quite surprised that FCE did not manage to digest the format. It’s Apple’s stuff, for god’s sake!
I quickly made a search on how to make the screen capture editable on FCE. I found the answer here on Apple’s discussion forums. The final answer was to import the clip into iMovie. So I opened the clip in iMovie and soon noticed that I would not be able to export the clip in the screen resolution that I had used while capturing the video. The size was the usual 1024×768 on a data projector. Damn it! Resampling the image smaller makes the reading of the mouse cursor position tedious, whereby, that should be avoided. Instead, zooming is often utilised to enable making the video file into manageable size for the web. And I don’t have any good experiences with new iMovie versions on doing any editing.
Anyway, I needed to go back to the forum, where I found the iMovie tip. I found a software called Streamclip (by Squared5), which could do the rendering into a format, which runs on FCE, and in full resolution.
I then opened the file in the FCE. I first needed to render the audio, which took some 3 minutes, before starting to ‘work’. I’m not a great fan of FCE after using my favourite video editing software, Sony’s (Originally Sonic Foundry) Vegas video. FCE feels like an old dinosaur when I compare it to the fluency of use of Vegas. FCE has serious usability problems, which make me easily pissed off.
Finally I could start rendering of the movie. I rendered it though Elgato Turbo.264 HD in full resolution. But, I noticed that FCE had not processed the video in full resolution. It’s very very difficult to find the resolution of the project in FCE. Actually, FCE seems to handle the video in a size 768 x 576, which is something quite different than intended.
Phew. I think I’m done for now. Perhaps I just do it with Sony Vegas and get something done. (And I need to start Windows for that… yack!)
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I’ve been lately pondering upon the issue, how to enable design students better be capable of articulating and sharing their thinking. We had Sarah Bodil Hansen visiting from the Danish Design School, and she did a brief study on how designers might employ existing technologies on the web for the purpose. You will find her study is attached to this post.
Noteworthy in Hansen’s text is the appraisal that designers need tools that feed forward the reflection rather than functioning as a mere back mirror. According to Hansen Google wave might work as a platform for reflection that fosters a light weight articulation to support forward going reflection.
Reflections by Sarah Bodil Hansen [PDF, 0.7 MB]
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I visited today the MediaLab’s demoday at TaiK (4th floor). I found Michihito Mizutani’s work with Arduino and Maemo quite interesting. Their this Fall’s prototyping course is presented here.
Check out this: http://www.insideria.com/2009/12/28-rich-data-visualization-too.html
You’ll find a set of 28 tools for creating graphs, Gantt charts, diagrammers, calendars/schedulers, gauges, mapping, pivot tables, OLAP cubes, and sparklines, in Flash, Flex, Ajax or Silverlight.
I installed the Auto Twitter plugin to see, if the message goes to twitter… (apparently it doesn’t work as the screen gets blank, and my Twitter account doesn’t show any activity). So, I’ll test another plugin for the purpose.
Then another one called “WP -> Twitter”. The first impression is better. It also uses bit.ly or cli.gs to abreviate the links. Let’s see. -Yep, it seems to appear on Twitter.
One student group in the User Inspired Design course used Prezi.com for their presentation. I was astonished about the tool. You may find it here: http://prezi.com/
I’ve been looking for a solution that would help me with the problem that the new AVCHD camcorders have set. It’s the problem, how to get the video stuff editable for your computer. It might be that the software called HandBrake might be helpful in this.
The software is available for Mac, Linux and Windows, which make it much more useful hint for an educator, who wants to give advice to students how to make their videos editable from a camcorder such as the new Canon consumer models, which record high definition digital video.
PS: I love Elgato products, such as the Turbo.264 HD, which do the trick a bit quicker and nicer. But the downside with Elgato is the price (> 140€).