Thursday, December 28, 2006

GigaSize file sharing

I put a couple high-res WMV files on GigaSize to see if it was a viable alternative to putting videos on YouTube (which makes them look like poo).

I was thinking that maybe putting links to GigaSize will be a creative way to save money on hosting space for when I get my website up and running. This is kind of a sucky solution to getting videos online though, since there's no online viewing - you have to download the file to your local machine. But, it's better then nothing - and it is kind of cool that there is a free biggie sized file sharing solution out there...

Anyway, that's the way this kind of "large size" file sharing works. So, feel free to follow the link to download and watch a short video I edited about absentee voting:

Absentee Voting PSA

DVD burning

I got the National Capital Chesapeake Bay Regional Emmy Awards call for entries in the mail today. Looks like they've decided to leap forward with technology themselves. Entries this year are only accepted in DVD-R format, which means there's a new thing on my list of things to figure out.

So, I went on my AVID at work and got to it. I've been able to make straight records to DVD for a while, using a stand-alone DVD burner that's connected to a video player. That's lame, though, because it's always been that dumb blue menu with no chapters and all that. Not much going on today, so I decided to dig into the SONIC program that I got with our AVID install. Within only a couple hours of playing around I was able to make a fairly decent DVD! I had a nice menu with an animated background, six little chapter buttons with video running in little thumbnails, and all of the chaptering and whatnot seemed to work fine. The video quality was not what it should be (I used Sorenson Squeeze - I think that compressed things too much) and I couldn't quite get music on the menu for some reason.

These should be easy things to fix - I'll just export from the AVID differently and I should be able to figure out the menu music... Anyway, I'm generally pleased with my results, so I'm confident I will be able to get a DVD made for the Emmys before the January 26 deadline. Plus, I'll be able to send out completed programs and work samples on DVD now, too.

Wednesday, December 27, 2006

YouTube attempt

Well, I uploaded a video to YouTube using the settings they recommend and it turned out kinda crappy and the audio is all out of sync. I checked out a couple forums and such and seems there's lots of theories and explanations for both problems. In general, motion and "video information" are not handled well by the conversion to Flash (the format that YouTube presents videos in). Anyway, as another step in learning a bit about YouTube, here's an attempt at posting an embedded YouTube video:



Cool. In other news, I took a DreamWeaver 2004 class a year or so ago, but I've forgotten a lot of it. Next on my list is going to be to buy my domain name and see about getting a website up. I should be able to figure out how to get some hi-res videos on the internet for all to see that way.

Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Why I have a blog

I was in a meeting yesterday and we went off on a tangent about online networking and one of the older folks in the group was all confused and said "what's Friendster?" No big deal, right? Well, after some friendly quizzing, we found out that they were completely bewildered at the very concept of most of the web 2.0 sites. Myself, as well as a couple of other people in the room under the age of 30, tried hard to not be condescending in our explanation of things. As the conversation continued, some of the middle-aged guys in the room remained suspiciously quiet and a couple working moms chimed with comments like "yeah, my 14 year old daughter is on her MySpace all the time! I have no idea what that's all about" and "is it like AOL?"

Is this me in ten years? I think it could be. I'm paying attention to the new stuff, but I'm not quite participating. Whatever it is, it's time to play catch up to make sure that I don't start down that slippery slope to being totally out of touch. Time to take an inventory of things. I'm not too far behind on the curve - I've kept up pretty well: I have a Blackberry, I own a Yahoo! group, I use PayPal, I dropped my Hotmail account for Gmail account back when it was tough to get Gmail account. But this is stuff that's been around for years. Heck, I've been on eBay since 1998.

I need to get on board with the new stuff. I need to jump on this web 2.0 stuff. I don't understand iTunes. I need to buy my domain name, create a MySpace page, get some videos on YouTube, and of course, start a blog.

I don't want to be clueless in 10 years - my kid is going to be zapping pirated media back and forth to his friends and the new guys at work will be laughing at my inability to use the new websites or files or gadgets... I'm not sure if it's a scared of being old thing or a scared of being clueless thing. Maybe the older you get the harder it is to understand this stuff. I guess I'm about to find out.