vlog 4.0 [a blog about vogs]

Video Syndication

Ok, this has all raced ahead in a matter of a fortnight. I haven’t had time to try and syndicate video via RSS enclosures yet, and this is what I’ve gleaned from various places:

Once syndication is happening, then we can worry about if it proves useful, personally I believe it is more important to be able to cite each other’s work and link to it, rather than syndicate, but we can have both (it isn’t about one or the other). I am intrigued though at how fast this has happened, and I’d probably argue this is because people understand syndication (after all it is what old media has done for years). The other stuff, that’s harder to get your head around.

lookANDsee

The blog of Gordon Smith, who emailed me today about how WordPress now does enclosures for video and audio automatically. That rate of development pretty much guarantees that I’ll be migrating a lot of content to WordPress in the very near future. Gordon’s photo blog: lookANDsee

Next gen Codec

This is a piece from a few months ago on CNET about the development of H.264 and Microsoft’s VC-9 codec. It does an excellent job of discussing the implications and significance of all this, of why this discussion matters and what the differences are. I know that H.264 has been accepted as the codec for next gen. DVD, and since it is an open standard I reckon that’s a good thing. I don’t know if and when a decision will be made about other forms of delivery (cable, satellite, etc).

Brisbane Ranges Two

Hot on the heels of the first Brisbane Ranges vog I’ve repeated the content, Brisbane Ranges Two is the result. This time with a different coloured background to the text track. In addition I’ve now added a couple of very simple sprites that toggle the text track on and off. I would have done this in the first Brisbane Ranges vog, but I was worried that no one would mouse around and discover that there were text tracks. So the first task was to show text tracks, the next was to make them a bit more amenable to user actions. As I mentioned in the entry about that work, since they’re text tracks they’re independent objects in the movie. So they can be turned on or off (you can also make them scroll, up down, left and right, change font, colour, you can even let people add their own text to the movie…).

Innovation in Patterns

This is an extract from an interview with Scott D. Anthony who is a consultant interested in innovation. It describes, indirectly, the curriculum changes we’re undertaking in our media program, it also emphasises some of these qualities that network literacies proposes. It is about pattern recognition (configuration), not just analysis (interpretation) of gross numbers.

Brisbane Ranges vog

While sitting in Canberra I quickly put together a simple vog. It is a video and sound track with two text tracks, the only interactive element is that Jay’s name and Textation are clickable in the text track. I wouldn’t even really call that interactive. The footage is from April when Sean Cubitt, Jeremy Yuille, Anna and I went walking. I’d promised Sean to take him out in the bush if he wanted, and this was the trip. It’s called Brisbane Ranges vog.

It is a quick response to an email where the use of text in video was mentioned and Jay responded. Text in QuickTime is trivial to make, incredibly useful, and another example of how misunderstood all this stuff is. So, a) a QuickTime text track is text, that’s it. It isn’t lettering that gets rendered into the video, like you do when making titles in a video editing program, it stays and is stored as text. B) it renders differently on different platforms, because it is just text. If you want text that is static, burn it in (you can do this in QuickTime but just use your editing package). c) Keeping it just text means that it stays as an independent layer in your video. Add to it, delete it, hide it, reveal it, it means it is an object available to be scripted because it is an individual layer in the movie. D) It is searchable. On an Apple click Command-R and type in some text. There you go, you now have a text track that anyone can search. (Try that with your film titles.) E) Text can be clickable, so it can load URLs and also be used to interact with other parts of the video.

Videoblogging with Blogger

From the very productive blog of Jon Hoem comes a tutorial on Videoblogging with Blogger

Tomorrow

This is what I’m doing tomorrow. What this doesn’t say is that I’m writing the presentation now, then collecting my kids, getting up at around 5.30 am to get them to school and Anna and I to the airport.

I’m looking forward to catching up with Seth, and spending a long weekend in Canberra sans work. A couple of other people have been in touch too, so I’ll probably see them after the gig.

Apple – QuickTime – Tools Tips – Tutorials

Apple – QuickTime – Tools & Tips – Tutorials:

http://homepage.mac.com/qt4web/sprites/items.html

has lots of small QT movies that you can use to add functionality to
your own movies without worrying about scripting. From the people who
wrote the bible (aka QuickTime on the Web).

Fresh from the videoblog

Fresh from the videoblog email list:

No time this week, or next, to play with this stuff, so by the time I get time the revolution will probably have begun.