ELGG
Think I have found the system I will be using in Honours in 2006 (I’ve been appointed acting honours coordinator – the brief is simple, bums on seats).
Archived entries for
Patchouli
Patchouli is something you stick on your server and lets you capture, compress and publish video to a blog. This is seriously nice. Unfortunately my server is still running OS X 10.2 so I can’t install, and also I think it might need DotClear as the blog engine (where documentation is in French). It is in beta, is available, and this is a seriously excellent first step to integrated tools for video blogging.
Got a Bit Lost
This semester I’ve been teaching the second half of Integrated Media. This one is where we are to get down and very dirty into QuickTime. Several problems of my own creation.
The first is I’ve dramatically underestimated how much basic tech. literacy I have, and you need to be able to enter this and be in control. We all need to be in control of the basics – this is what moves us from being naif to critical users. It is half way through the course and we are not where I thought we would be. This is not the fault of the students’, it is me having underestimated just how much we can get done and understood (that’s the important part).
The second is that I tried to pack too much into the pedagogy. We spent quite a bit of time dealing with collaboration, collaborative assessment and identifying work and learning styles. This is valuable, but not useful in this subject. Here we are working on small media. Blog scale. It is about individuals being able to make stuff, publish it, experiment with it. Collaboration happens, but it is quite different to big media (even no budget film) where you inevitably have cast, crew, and so on. Why did I do this? I think because I was anxious about what they were learning about collaboration, or not learning, and so tried to include it here. Doesn’t fit. And like choosing shoes, you don’t try to make them fit if they don’t.
Rhizome 5
Rhizome 5 is a template for a lightweight interactive movie. As with all the other rhizome movies, you can download it and use it to display your own content. This one is a minor variation on rhizome 4, so that instead of slowing down the video as you mouse into it, it speeds it up. The speed is a simple calculation of current frame rate x .1.5 and so on. I haven’t bothered to test how fast it can go. Clicking the video restores it to normal speed.
Note, in the above it is the video pane next to the one you mouse into that actually changes speed.
You can rename rhizome5.mov to whatever, but rhizome5.xml can’t be renamed.
- rhizome movie 5 zip
- rhizome movie 5 tar
- rhizome movie 5 with Livestage project zip
- rhizome movie 5 with Livestage project tar
Technorati Tags: rhizomeMovie
Rhizome 4.0
Well, continuing the recent flurry of rhizome movie templates here’s number 4. This one:
- has three child tracks, made up of two video and one sound track
- mousing into either video mutes the other video, so if you want all to have sound, go for it (but you can’t mute the independent soundtrack)
- mousing into a video pane slows the other video, this is exponential – the speed of the other video is 1/number of mouse entries
- if you video has sound, that will be slowed as well
- clicking the video window restores the other video window to normal speed
As with the other works which video and sound is loaded into this movie is controlled by its associated xml file (in this case rhizome4.xml).
In case you’re only just finding these for the first time. These QuickTime clips use QuickTime’s child movie feature. The rhizome movie file (rhizome4.mov) is more like a movie browser. When viewed it reads rhizome4.xml and loads the content indicated there. The rhizome movie then plays this content within the parent container. In this example it plays two different video files along side each other. They are completely independent of each other, so can have different durations, soundtracks, etc. In addition there is a soundtrack that is loaded as well.
These tracks can be any sort that QuickTime can view, and they can be located at any viable URL.
- rhizome 4 zip
- rhizome 4 tar
- rhizome 4 with livestage project zip
- rhizome 4 with livestage project tar
Technorati Tags: rhizomeMovie
Rhizome Movie 1.3 and 2.1 Updates
Rhizome 1 and rhizome 2 have been misbehvaing. When I scripted them I did not add an idle event to check the load state of each of the child movies, so if you’re two child videos were large, or on a slow server, it was easy to get ‘failure to load’ errors. I have amended each of these so that now a script runs checking the load state of the child movies, and they will only begin to play (or try to play) if at least 2 seconds of video has been downloaded. (This does have the consequence that if your child movie is less than 2 seconds in length it will never play.)
If you want to replace any existing rhizome movies with the new templates, just download the new ones and all you need to replace is the .mov part. The xml remains unchanged.
rhizome.mov 1.3 zip
rhizome.mov 1.3 tar
rhizome.mov 1.3 with livestage project file zip
rhizome.mov 1.3 with livestage project file tar
rhizome.mov 2.1 zip
rhizome.mov 2.1 tar
rhizome.mov 2.1 with livestage project file zip
rhizome.mov 2.1 with livestage project file tar
Now, onto rhizome 3.0.
Rhizome Movie 3.0
This rhizome movie repeats the same one that Andreas recently made. The only reason I have done one as well is to keep the series going for my own sake – when it comes to making scripted content I think I am dully literal and it is a very iterative design-come-writing practice. I build one, then make minor modifications to get to two, and so on. So I’m quite scared about missing one step.
Andreas’ version also uses his QTXML generator. This is a web page that generates custom XML files to be read by the rhizome movie. Once I take the next step in this work (a minor step) so that I can pull out a range of variables via XML, I can think about using the generator.
So, rhizome movie 3.0. It loads two video movies and plays them simultaneously, looping continuously, there are controllers visible for each, so they can be stopped, started, and so on independently. There is now an additional child movie, which is a sound track. This soundtrack is not controllable by users, it just plays, and loops. So…
There are several ways of using it. I have retained the same sound behaviour in rhizome 3 as in rhizomes 1 and 2 – mouse into a video pane enables that sound and mutes the other. In rhizome 3 it will mute the other video track but not the child sound track. This means you could have two silent video tracks and just rely on the soundtrack, or you could have sound in your video tracks and the loaded sound track plays off this in some way (much like Philip has achieved with his ninja movie).
As with the other movies this reads the urls of the child movies from an external xml file (rhizome3.xml). This file must be located in the same directory as rhizome3.mov, and cannot be renamed. You can rename rhizome3.mov to whatever you like, and the content you load can be from any valid url.
As with the other works, if you use it, please email me with a url so I can check it out, and write about it.
Technorati Tags: rhizomeMovie
Squared 5
This is freeware that does very nice things to muxed video files. Muxed means sound and video data is interleaved in the one file structure. QuickTime does not do a nice job of exporting this, so this tool does all this, and much more. Essential part of any serious videobloggers tool box.
Metadata Hootenanny
A list video blogger Steve Garfield has made metadata hootenanny. An app to make it easy to add metadata to QuickTime. QuickTime has a large metadata structure which is all inside of the file structure. You can add to it via QuickTime Pro (or LiveStage, which is much more elegant), but it is long winded and ugly. So Steve’s made it easier.
Metadata in QuickTime could be a good idea. If it were used, and used well, it won’t take long for web applications/services to appear that can understand it and then pull out this information. things like director name, date, copyright information, an associated url.
Update. I don’t think Steve wrote this, he just emailed the details to me.