I’ve listened to a bunch of great stories lately, about a bunch of great people. Muhammad Ali helping some college students on the side of the road. Bobby Kennedy being a politician who can relate to the common man, despite being a spoiled rich kid. And the pain and suffering in Jefferson Davis‘ life during the civil war era. These are just some of the snippetts I heard while editing the 18 Great Lives Biographies over the last two weeks (there are 19 total). While I’m glad to have a break from it, I will want to go back and listen to them when I have a chance. There are some riveting speakers in this wonderful series, and it’s the 2nd year of offering the webcasts (check out the 2005 archives).
I used a combination of Adobe Premiere Pro 2, Adobe Photoshop CS2, Adobe Audition, and TechSmith’s SnagIt. With all of the blogging that goes on in DTLT at Mary Washington, it seemed like presenting the videos in a blog was a natural. There are some technical and practical hurdles to overcome however. The obvious advantages are the ability to subscribe to the blog and be informed when newest webcasts are available. Also there is an opportunity to comment on the webcasts. The obstacles are the standard problems you have when you try to do video on the web. What format do you use? What quality setting? How much bandwidth will these take?
Fortunately the bandwidth issue, while not unlimited, has been greatly improved since last year. Our hosting company, Bluehost, currently offers 400GB of bandwidth per month. Compare that to the 25GB we had a year ago for the Great Lives videos. We use the Real format for videos for some very basic reasons. From my observations it gives the best quality-to-file-size ratio for a format that is cross-platform. Windows Media is slightly better in quality, but it doesn’t work quite as well as Real Video on a Mac. And believe me, I don’t think Real is by any means perfect. I considered QuickTime, but the files are just too large with an acceptable quality setting. I love the Flash video format, but those are intended for shorter duration videos (10-15 minutes, or less). I even considered DivX, but it requires yet another download/plugin that, at this point, hasn’t reached a saturation point yet (maybe I should help this along?).
At this point in the school year, it is final exam time. I guess you could consider the Great Lives Webcasts to be my final exam. What have I learned over the past year about supporting this type of communication? With no intention of being trite, the answer is, a lot. Video on the web is one of those areas of specialization in computers that has a world of its own, with its own community and language. The next step in the learning process is to begin to synthesize my knowledge of web video into new modes of presenting information, and hopefully, new modes of learning. What I’ve also learned is that it’s all about the workflow.
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