Category: Productivity

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A Series of Tubes

I’ve been having a bit of a play with YouTube lately… not just as a consumer of content, but in true spirit of Web 2.0, as a contributor of content. It’s a pretty cool site and it’s easy to while away the minutes, er, hours, browsing through their stuff.

I was really interested to find that Apple’s totally rewritten new version of iMovie has built in support for adding videos to YouTube. It is nicely integrated too… as you finish working on your movie (using the new interface, which could be the topic of a whole other blog post), you just select YouTube from the Share menu and iMovie does all the digital origami required to package up your masterpiece into the appropriate formats and compression ratios to send it up to the ‘Tube. It’s very neat. It prompts you to add the relevant metadata and tags, and does a fairly efficient job of rendering and converting the file, then uploading it.

As a test, I edited together this little production last night using some Mac vs PC ads I just happened to have laying about on my hard drive. The process is easy, they imported into iMovie very simply, the new workflow is interesting and newbie video editors will probably love it, and the whole thing was put together in a very short timeframe.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/hRlKxVVGWks" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

I thought it was fascinating to realise how many of these Mac vs PC ads have been made, and to see just how diverse they are.

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Blown away by Jing

I think I just experienced one of those “Oh my God” moments when you see a new technology that takes a task you potentially do often and simplifies in a way that you never thought possible. The reason I say that you “potentially” do it often is that these tasks are usually either difficult or time consuming or just plain inconvenient because they involve too many steps, so you tend to avoid them where possible. An example would be sharing what you see on your screen with someone else across a network. Still images aren’t too hard, but capturing an animated movie of what you are doing on your screen is tricky and usually requires special software, and then the task of sharing that movie over the Internet usually requires a few more steps, plus the issues of incompatable file formats, Mac/Windows issues, yaddah, yaddah… Too hard!

So when I just downloaded and installed Jing from the Jing Project, I was blown away by just how much they have simplified this process. I literally sat in front of the computer repeating “Oh my God!” several times. Perhaps I am just easily impressed, or perhaps this is just the sort of thing that I see very clear uses for, but I am amazed at what Jing does, and even moreso at how it does it. I can see tons of uses for this in a school… for example, teachers could create their own support pages for software the kids need to use so that they don’t have to answer the same questions over and over… students can be creating movies to document their software skills… you can make tutorials for teachers showing them how to do specific tasks… or an end-user could use it to show you exactly what is happening on their screen… and lots more. The finished out is a .swf Flash file.

The Jing Project website will explain more, so check it out or check out my little sample. Let me know if I’m just being easily impressed.

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Collecting Cool Clips

Someone at work asked me a question today about how to do something, and I thought it was a good question. Sometimes, the definition of a good question is a question I happen to know the answer to, and in this case I did. 🙂 Although I’ve written about this topic before, it was a while ago and since the answer might be of use to others I thought I’d respond here in my blog. That way I can just direct my colleague Bernie to the blog to get the answer, plus it might benefit a few others as well.

The question was this… “If I see a video on YouTube that would be useful to me, how can I get my own standalone copy?”

This would be useful if you needed to show that video somewhere you weren’t connected to the Net, or to embed it into a slideshow for example. The videos on YouTube are in Flash Video format, (.flv) and don’t play nicely with most other programs such as PowerPoint or Keynote files. (The notable exception is SmartNotebook, which works really well with them).

So, here’s a solution…

  1. Go to YouTube and load up the video you wish to view.
  2. Select the URL of that page and copy it to the clipboard.
  3. Go to www.vixy.net and paste the URL link from YouTube into the empty URL field.
  4. Select your choice of output video format from the dropdown list.
  5. Click the Start button.

Just be a bit patient, as Vixy goes over to YouTube, finds the video, converts it, and then downloads it to your computer in the format you’ve selected. Too easy! Hope that helps you out Bernie…

Now, if you’re the more geeky type (like me) and you use Firefox or Flock or Camino or any other Gecko-powered browser, you might like to try another method using the free Mozilla add-on called UnPlug… it’s one of my favourite add-ons for the Gecko engine… Unplug let’s you, well, unplug any embedded media from a webpage and save it to your computer. Of course, this means it is still in .flv format, but I then just drop it into the wonderful VisualHub application and it spits it out in whatever format I want. Noice!

BTW, this is the video we were trying to convert…

[kml_flashembed movie="http://youtube.com/v/csS_RnOhd-Q" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

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