Many moons ago I blogged about a video converter called Evom. I loved it (still do) for its simplicity and for its unique features. I’ve found something similar for the PC. It’s been available for a while, but a new version (3.0) has just been released that gets close to Evom for the PC. It’s called Miro Video Converter and to use it you simply drag your video file into the window, select what device you want to convert for, and then click the convert button at the bottom of the window. There are tons of choices to convert files to. All of the latest Apple devices are listed, as well as Android devices and even the Kindle Fire. It also allows the conversion to “open” format file types such as Ogg Theora (video) and Ogg Vorbis (audio). There’s even the choice of WebM for those of you still holding out hope for that format to catch on. Though my advice to you would be to exhale.

Now my favorite feature from Evom was that you are able to drag a YouTube URL from a web browser window into Evom and it would begin downloading and convert your video. That feature works much less consistently now, if at all. So I still use Firefox and the Video Download Helper plugin to download YouTube videos. Once they are on my machine I can then use Evom to convert them to an audio MP3 file. I’m happy to report that the MP3 conversion feature works in Miro Video Converter too, though quite a bit slower than Evom. But hey, these are free programs we’re talking about.

So Miro is also available for the Mac, but I prefer Evom, for most of what I do. Mostly because it is faster. However there is one other intriguing feature that Miro has. It can convert into what are known as “ingestion” formats, such as ProRes (what Final Cut Pro X likes), AVC Intra, and DNxHD. What this means in theory is that you could convert videos into formats that are recognized natively in video editing software. How this would work in practice remains to be seen. But it’s interesting to see those options.

I have several students every semester ask how they can get the audio from a YouTube clip into their projects, and now I have a program that I can recommend for PC users.

While we’re not quite ready for our Convergence Center yet, with the help of our head librarian and some funds from the state, we will soon establish a space in the Simpson Library to facilitate video editing. We are going to go with iMacs for the simple reason that PC video editors are just dogs. And I’m happy to have the argument conversation with anybody about which is better, just as long as we start with the comparison of video editors that “come with” the Mac and the PC (iMovie vs. Movie Maker). I put “come with” in quotes because iMovie is now pre-installed on all Macs, and Movie Maker is a free download for PCs. I will also accept submissions for best paid video editor software on either platform, though I think Final Cut Pro X is the best, Adobe Premiere CS6 is a close 2nd (and available on both platforms), and back in the day Sony’s Vegas on the PC was cool. There. Let comments fly.

Before I tell you what I’m spec’ing out, I will say that we will have both Final Cut Pro X and Adobe Premiere (as well as the rest of Production Suite) on these iMacs. So here goes. I have a budget, but I don’t know that exact figure as I’m writing this. I had to approximate the cost of each iMac months ago, knowing there was a good  chance a new version would be introduced. Therefore my approach is getting what I think to be the minimum features and then adding or subtracting as needed. More importantly I’ll give you my reasons (and a few beefs).

I’m going with the 2.9GHz Quad-core Intel Core i5 version of the iMac including 16GB of memory and the 1TB Fusion drive. Also the wired Apple mouse and the wired keyboard with numeric keypad. Wired peripherals are much more reliable when editing, and the numeric keypad adds keyboard shortcuts that editors need. Now the other iMac option for the 21.5″ size screen is a 2.7GHz model, but that doesn’t offer the Fusion drive. What is a Fusion drive you may ask? It is essentially a “hybrid drive” made up of a solid-state drive (the iMac uses a 128GB drive) and a traditional platter based drive. It will all add up to 1 TB of space. Solid-state drives are very similar to USB flash drives but much faster and in a hard-drive form factor. The platter drives are what we’ve been using for over 20 years, only the speeds and capacities have changed. I remember purchasing hard drives measured in megabytes (MB). The “hybrid” is software that controls how and where the data on the two drives is saved. Files or programs that are accessed more often will be available on the flash drive, where less frequently accessed files will reside on the platter drive. Software will monitor this and operate in an optimized way (in theory).

As far as memory goes, it’s a choice of 8 or 16GB. I’m going with 16GB because programs like video editors like memory, usually the more the better. An extra $200 is a bit over priced, but it is virtually impossible to add memory later. A beef that many people have raised already. For most (non-video editing) people, 8GB would be fine for several years into the future and only people who know what the benefits of more memory will even consider 16GB. I don’t have the same beef about the memory issue. Don’t get me wrong. iMacs aren’t cheap and paying $1300 or more, some people expect more access to the components for upgrading. Well to them I say those days have sailed. We buy computers as appliances. PCs are still more accessible in terms of upgrades and tweaking. Macs are sealed up from the factory, except for the Mac Pro, and the Mac Mini to some extent. If you want to hack your Mac, you need to build it from scratch – Hackintoshes anyone?

What does make me a bit nervous (and Apple Care will have to be added for insurance) is the hard drive going bad, as our current 27″ iMac suffered exactly that fate. Taking it apart (by an Apple tech who came to campus) was not for the faint of heart. He came with a toolkit that included suction cups – I kid you not – to take off the glass screen to get to the hard drive. In some ways the new iMac may be easier to get to the hard drive because it is the uppermost component underneath the screen. However, the screen needs to be pried open with what looks like a guitar pick and then presumably needs to be resealed with adhesive. *shudder*

The other thing that makes me nervous is simply, I hope the Fusion technology works. I’m a big believer in solid-state hard drives. You can’t just order a solid-state drive in the 21.5″ iMacs, however. It’s either a traditional drive or the Fusion. The 27″ iMac does have the solid-state option (as well as user accessible memory), but it’s a $1300 upgrade (for a 768GB drive)! An option for a 256GB drive on all of the iMacs would be my preference. Often a company called Other World Computing (OWC) offers various upgrades on Macs. They may have some choices in the future.

So once again:

• 2.9GHz Quad-core Intel Core i5, Turbo Boost up to 3.6GHz
• 16GB 1600MHz DDR3 SDRAM – 2x8GB
• 1TB Fusion Drive
• NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 512MB GDDR5
• Apple Mouse
• Apple Keyboard with Numeric Keypad
• Apple Care

That’s around $2000 before software. I may have to give up the Fusion drive and more memory if we’re over budget. Regardless, I still think this gives students a better creative experience for editing video (and if need be audio). And hey, we can always create a Windows partition if we need to…nahhh.

We’ll update as this story unfolds…

I decided not to wait until Friday to have some fun. All of us in DTLT are acting a bit shell-shocked to be back after Thanksgiving num-nums. I started the week by going through the process of switching hosting for this site. I’m moving to MediaTemple for all of my business and personal hosting.

In the mean time, while waiting for files to FTP to a local drive, I have been playing with Google Earth. It’s been a while, but I have always known that I wanted to incorporate “fly-over” videos into some video projects. The Google Earth Pro program allows you to export your “tours” as movies. The Pro version is $400 though. However, if you have good screen capture software (I used Telestream’s ScreenFlow), you can fake it with a little extra time and effort.

The above video was done by playing the Google Earth tour while recording in ScreenFlow. Then I cropped out the navigation buttons and graphics. I added the Shining music and then exported the video. Pretty simple as far as this goes. More experiments to come. I would love to see some folks do personalized versions of these types of videos. Make a tour from your home (or some other place in the world if you’re paranoid) to work and add the Shining opening theme to it. It’s fun.

A while back I “gushed” about Skitch and hoped that a Windows version would be available soon. Well, it arrived a short time ago and I wanted to let folks know. It is very similar to the Mac version that I talked about and it even has the incredibly valuable “Drag Me” feature.

As I mentioned previously, the Evernote group took over the Skitch program and they have tightly integrated it into the Evernote program (which I also use and LOVE). They have also greatly simplified the program which I have mixed feelings about. It was quirky, and I imagine that it was slightly complicated for some, but I was used to it. However, it still works well for what it does, which is grabbing screens or bits of screens and publishing them. So if you haven’t installed it yet, go get it (it’s free). While you’re at it try out Evernote which allows you to take notes and sync them everywhere.

Often times the most innocent questions spawn a great deal of research for me. For example, I was asked recently what was the best way to download a youtube video to use in a project. It’s a pretty easy question to answer from a technical standpoint. I’ll answer it as part of this post. However, the question allows me to revisit a topic near and dear to us in the Teaching and Learning Technologies division. The idea of repurposing and transforming existing media to tell digital stories.

I’ve gone down this path before after a comment on a previous post led me to look into YouTube’s terms of service. The question is about the breaking of the terms of service for YouTube videos. A few things have changed about the YouTube service in the last three years since, but what has remained constant is the fact that the technology behind watching videos at their site is still “progressive download” and there is a whole raft of tools dedicated to exploit that fact.

So first the tools, because that is probably the most likely reason that you would be reading this. Let me first say that there is some secret sauce in YouTube’s implementation of progressive download technology. I believe it has to do with balancing the idea of using a technology that provides the best experience, but uses a few tricks to hide the video file that is downloaded to your computer.

My favorite and most consistent tool over the last few years is the Video DownloadHelper plugin for Firefox. The big advantage with this method is that, in my experience, it works the most consistently with the most number of videos available on YouTube. Relatively recently, YouTube has moved away from Flash format video and toward MPEG-4 video. The reason being that iOS devices don’t support Flash and the push of HTML5 compatible formats has pushed h.264 technology to the forefront. Video DownloadHelper will allow you to see both the FLV and the MP4 format files for a given video. The downside to this method is that Firefox might not be your browser of preference, and there is the plugin that needs to be installed. It isn’t terribly difficult to set up, but I do recognize that I only use Firefox when I want to grab a YouTube video.

Another tool that I have used for acquiring YouTube videos is MPEG Streamclip. While MPEG Steamclip’s raison d’être is to edit MPEG video, it has a built-in YouTube downloader that allows you to immediately begin to trim a video down to what you need for your project. It’s downside is that it doesn’t always allow you to get the video you want. It will display a “File open error”.

This would have been the space where I talked about a cool new tool called Adapter. It HAD a built-in web browser that allowed you to surf to your video and then would queue it up to start the download. Well, the latest Flash download (11.4) broke this program’s functionality to such an extent (it only would download videos that were 720p and 1080p mp4s), that they have pulled that feature indefinitely. A nice screencast would have gone here.

So what of the ethics of downloading YouTube videos? Well, the caution is that most of the videos on YouTube have full “all rights reserved” copyrights. You can’t obtain YouTube videos and do with them as you wish. There is a Creative Commons (CC) licensing system, but it’s rare that the average uploader takes advantage of this. What has changed over the last few years is that you can select CC licenses as your default copyrighting choice when you put a video up on YouTube.

The paradox is that YouTube’s terms of service states that “unless you see a “download” or similar link displayed by YouTube on the Service for that Content”, you aren’t allowed to download. However, the technology is based on the browser technology downloading the given video every single time. It is part of the definition of “progressive download”. Now in browsers such as Google’s Chrome, and Apple’s Safari, the secret temporary storage is quite well hidden. With Firefox though, it can be proven that the video is saved in a cache folder and therefore the user is breaking the terms of service every time by watching the video.

The more things change, the more they stay the same.

So what is Skitch?

Well it’s a program that was recently bought by the folks at Evernote. If you’re not familiar with Evernote, then you’re missing something special in and of itself. Skitch though is a screen capture program that I think is pretty special. Now the Mac is known for having a pretty good screen capture program built in, and when combined with the built-in Preview program there’s a decent system for managing screenshots to use in documentation or to send in an email to your family member who needs to see a picture to understand how something works.

Here’s a little more info about why Skitch is so great. Skitch makes it all so much easier, and while there is no Windows version yet, it is a must-have program if you’re a Mac user. It’s a program that you must have in your toolkit.

Official Skitch Website

Skitch.com

Culpeper, Virginia. The camera slowly pans up exposing a very small man-made body of water and a grid of square and rectangular box-shapes made of concrete. A concave wall of windows is set back within each box. Text fades up on the screen that reads “Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation – Library of Congress” George Willeman is on screen talking about the first films ever made – “all these people who worked on these things are all gone now, but they have left behind these amazing shadows for us to enjoy.”

This is a scene early on in the film “These Amazing Shadows: The Movies That Make America“. Documentarians Paul Mariano and Kurt Norton intersperse film clips and interviews as well as archival footage dating back to the silent era to contextualize the films that were made and why they are important to our culture. Each year 25 films are added to the National Film Registry (part of the Library of Congress) which are deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant films”.

The fact that the Packard Campus is just 40 minutes away in Culpeper is a film buffs dream. Each month they put together a film schedule that includes some classic films. Some are on the Registry, some are not. The movies are free, you just need to make a reservation to get a seat. I know, you’re jealous. I understand. What is even better than that is “These Amazing Shadows” in on Netflix instant watch (as well as on DVD), and it’s a great film to watch and get more suggestions of movies to put on your Netflix queue.

The passion with which the archivists do their jobs restoring the films is compelling. The excitement with which the featured actors and directors talk about film discoveries will inspire you to see lots of movies. James Billington, the Librarian of Congress will be your new hero. I can’t recommend “These Amazing Shadows” enough.

Why You Should Use Google Chrome

If you are tired of waiting for your web browser to load, or tired of waiting for web pages to appear, try Google Chrome. It also has the advantage of being a Google product so search is much easier (just type your search in the address bar), and much quicker (there surely must be some optimization for Google’s web browser).

Get Google Chrome

Google Chrome

VLC Media Player, or VideoLAN Client, is a program to play a wide array of video file formats as well as act as a video streaming server. It is a free, open source program that is available for Windows, Macintosh and Linux computers. We like VLC because of its universality, as it will play Windows video (.avi, and .wmv), Quicktime (.mov), Flash video (.flv), DivX and other MPEG4 formats such as h.264, as well as standard DVDs. It will even handle Real Player formats and popular audio file formats. It’s definitely a handy program to include in your toolkit.

Official VLC Media Player website

http://www.videolan.org/

There's a bit of history surrounding "The Kit". It all started with a presidential initiative back in 2006. We worked with a company to provide live streaming of lectures, and “boxes” that included all of the hardware needed to accomplish it, such as the computer, audio mixing board, two PTZ (Pan, Tilt, Zoom) video cameras, and a wireless microphone. It all got lugged around in a large rolling case, like something you’d see a band use on their world tour, pushing it in and out of the semi-trailer. It was huge, but it contained everything that was needed – except maybe the tripod wouldn’t quite fit.

The computer was a Shuttle PC with a Video Toaster card inside. I wrote (briefly) about it almost 4 years ago – Time to Make Video Toast.

It was a pretty sweet system in its day. Interesting how four years can seem like a generation ago when it comes to technology. This was also at a time when there was the shiny allure of recording in High Definition video. It was an upgrade for the Toaster that didn’t exist, even though HD cameras were available. Nope it was all Standard Definition video, with a composite connection to the Toaster, so the video quality was pretty low. When the time came to stream the video, a lot of the detail was being lost. For the 2009 Faculty Academy we used the Toaster with Ustream.tv. With no built in streaming capabilities (nothing cheap like Ustream anyway), we used an intermediary program called WebcamMax to get the captured video output to Ustream. It worked, and we got good feedback on the live stream, as well as exposing more people to the magic of Faculty Academy.

For 2010, my old Macintosh DNA was re-surging. I had started using a MacBook Pro in 2008, but I was using it to run Windows Vista. Pretty quickly I might add. I began making the switch to OS X in 2009, and I was beginning to investigate video solutions that would replace the Toaster. I found that the Mac platform had an interesting set of developers. There was also this strange phenomenon of bundled software deals available for Macs. In early February there was one called MacHeist. This was the third edition of this “event” and one of the programs included in the bundle was called Boinx TV. If enough people bought the bundle for $49, Boinx TV would be “unlocked”. The software normally sold for $249. I would get Boinx TV and other cool programs like WireTap Studio, Acorn, and Kinemac all for $49.

For Faculty Academy 2010 it was all Mac and Boinx TV. However, we still had the issue of using an intermediary program for streaming. CamTwist, a free program, was used to take the video output from Boinx TV and route it to the Ustream broadcasting page. It works by taking an area of the screen and making your computer think it’s just a built-in webcam (WebcamMax did the same thing). It did pretty well, but it necessitates some window juggling that adds to the interface complexity. The whole system was a general success, though the size of the iMac used was still a bit difficult  to lug around.

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by orioles29

A month later I presented at the 2010 NMC Summer Conference. Using my laptop and Boinx TV, we were inching closer to the ideal. It was a very well received presentation as I did a live show – broadcasted to the live audience and streamed live to the world. It was titled “This Old New Media Center” and the idea was to show how DIY “sweat equity” could be applied to new technologies for someone moderately technology-able to create a live streamed presentation.

At the beginning of 2011, I began to think of creating the ideal streaming kit. It would have to be a laptop, and one with some horsepower as this live streaming/recording is quite CPU intensive. Everything else would have to be compact as well. It would all have to fit in a backpack, with the exception of a good solid tripod. At about the same time, I was asked to be involved in recording our president give a State of the University speech. While we wouldn’t have the kit ready in time for the speech, we were able to cobble together most of the pieces that would ultimately make up the kit. Much as we liked the Boinx TV software, a critical piece to streamlining the live broadcast and recording was using Telestream’s Wirecast software. It has built-in streaming to several different services such as Ustream, Livestream, and Justin.tv to name a few. It also has a relatively simple interface for doing simple shows. It can also be used for some more complex tasks like chroma-keying (green screen) to put different backgrounds virtually in a video. It certainly is the next step in simplified live streaming.

At the 2011 ACCS of Virginia Conference in March, I again did a live show to unveil “The Kit”. I was able to stream live using Ustream and also make a recording, in HD no less, to the hard drive for archival purposes. I was able to present using the Wirecast software to the local audience and also stream the identical program. My Keynote presentation integrated nicely as Wirecast supports playing Keynote QuickTime movies, so I can advance a slide at a time, or even a bullet point at a time complete with the animations and transitions. A resource page for “The Kit” has the recorded presentation as well as a list of the components.

Kit Time Lapse from umwnewmedia on Vimeo.

I have since given two more presentations with the Kit, and it really is pretty simple to set up. Thanks to the great network of individuals found in the phenomenon known as DS106, we have already seen this employed for something known as DS106 TV. When the concept of DIY technology is unleashed on talented people, great things happen.