Too busy to post?

Yeah, the big move, the new job, the househunting... And a new blog, of course. All have taking up a lot of my time - and taken me away from being able to post here.

And I have great new stories to tell you, too: hotel electronic key cards, my wife's GPS navigation system, my hand-held GPS, my new work technology.... But I'm going to have to put this blog on hold for now until things settle down I think. Same goes with my website, which needs updating in a serious way since the job and residency changes....

Could this be the way it begins? I get to "busy" to do about this stuff? Now, in ten years, will I realize I've been too busy for so long that I'm out of the loop? Maybe I've reached my adult-life tipping point...

Arlington County is a YouTube Partner!

Well, it all seems kinda shady like a back room deal or something, but I got an email from tha Virginia State Government person today telling me that Arlington County's YouTube account had been upgraded to "Partner" status. I didn't even have do anything since my previous posting where I said I would apply - I guess she just emailed her contact at YouTube and got it done for me. That's great, but at the same time it seems weird that it works that way.

So, now I'm working to design the banner and logos and such that I can add to our page - there's a new section on the Account Management page for "Branding Options." Hopefully I can get something thrown together and put up there soon. The other awesome benefit (in addition to that auto-play that started this whole thing, of course) of being a partner is an increase in the max upload. As a partner, I'm still limited to 1044 MB per video, but there isn't a time restriction.

YouTube Partners

So, I've found out a lot more about the whole YouTube Partners thing. Apparently getting the extra features a partnership can provide can be as simple as applying to be a partner! This doesn't seem to be heavily advertised by YouTube, but there are instructions and loads of YouTube video bloggers talking about it, like this guy.

I think Arlington County should qualify - I've uploaded about 100 videos and we generate original content on a regular basis that is viewed by thousands (well, cumulatively maybe). I'll go through the application and we'll see! Heck, my personal YouTube account gets hits in the thousands, too, so maybe I'll see if I can be a partner on that side, too...

The YouTube "in crowd"

I found out that the state (er, Commonwealth) of Virginia signed up and has started posting videos.

They don't exactly have the whole thing figured out yet it seems, as some of their videos are unsynched and aren't quite YouTube "friendly," but whatever. The thing that really struck me was how when you go to their channel page, the main video plays automatically. Funny thing is, I was just talking to John Lisle, the PIO of Arlington's Police Department about this exact thing - the ACPD has a YouTube page of their own and John was asking me about how to make the video on the channel page play automatically (like the VA state channel). I didn't think it was possible, but now that I saw the VA state page doing it, I knew there was something to what John had said.

As any good internet researcher does, I turned to Google. I typed in "auto-play video on youtube channel page." This got me some good hits and basically what I learned is this: YouTube will work with celebrities, large companies, politicians and any other big powerful organization and give them a "super" page that can have its own fancy background, an auto-play video, and a couple other features. It's not something mentioned on YouTube's pages, in any of the account settings, or even in their help. Interesting....

So, I sent a friendly message to the VA state folks (linky on their channel page, of course). I offered a suggestion about encoding their video to help with the synch issue and inquired about the auto-play video... all in the interest of inter-governmental partnerships, etc...

I got a reply back, and long story short it is indeed a big Google who-you-know thing - the whole VA YouTube thing came out of a meeting between Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Governor Tim Kaine. Within two days, the VA YouTube page launched.

Sony XD Cams and proxy video possibilities

So we got our new Sony XD cameras in at work (HD, woo-hoo!), along with new decks and lots of other fun new gear. Looking at the gear and thinking about what other bits 'n' pieces we might need, I suggested we get some big flash drives.

The idea that I had was that we could shoot on the XD cams and use the proxy video to do some cuts-only editing with the free Sony software that comes with the cameras (and is available online). The proxy video (low-res versions of the video files that are stored on the Blu-Ray discs that the camera records to) would fit nicely on a big drive, and then we could do some editing at home on our personal computers.

I was thinking specifically about some of our simpler programs and promo stuff, like the Adopt-A-Pet show. That show is mostly cuts-only, with a layer of graphics put on top for lower thirds and transitions. It'd be easy to do the first edit at home, bring in the EDL (edit decision list) and the proxy video, and then have our AVIDs at work reconcile the full-res video and build out the HD timeline. Basically, I'm hoping we'll have some tele-commuting capability as a result of having these new cameras. Not so much consumer technology, which is more the topic for this blog, but it's cutting-edge stuff just the same. Cool!

Video update

I've been doing lots with YouTube and such lately, so here's an update: a while ago I realized it was clunky and messy to embed YouTube videos right on ericbolstridge.com. So, I simply put a link to my my YouTube account and another link to my Arlington County videos.

We've been cranking out content at work, so eventually the Arlington County YouTube account page was getting cluttered, and it was way too hard to find videos or expect anyone to see the "good stuff" with 70 or 80 videos spread over 6 pages... So, I dug into YouTube a bit, figured out Playlists, and set up a bunch to keep things organized. Now, I point people here at work (and on ericbolstridge.com) to the Arlington County Playlist page instead. Ooh, organization! How nice!

Converting video for YouTube: SOLVED

I figured it out! A little more research, a little more testing, and I've discovered the best codec for creating video for YouTube. A Quicktime H.263 for a faster output from my AVID (slower upload to YouTube), and H.264 for a slower output from my AVID (but a faaster upload to YouTube). H.264 is apparently much improved over the previous, but I see no difference in quality once it's converted over to teh flash of YouTube. Check out some of my YouTube videos! I have two accounts - one for work and one for my own stuff.

Web Cam on EricBolstridge.com?

I did a redesign of my website, EricBolstridge.com. All I really did is change the font and background, but hey, it looks a lot better and now it has several pages that I can add content to as I get around to it so whatever. I went ahead and added a page for "Web Cam," too. I'm going to look into how (if) I can stream images to the site from my desktop webcam here at work....

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.

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.