Social Web & literacy with ICT

Santa

This is my Santa Podcast YO!

Santa Messages from Neelin

Here are some Audacity files that my Communication Media students created to get used to using Audacity in the lead up to creating sound files to embed in their ebook for Children

Post Production Camstudio

Here is a few thinks I noticed after joining of the AVIs and the conversion to Flash (SWF & FLV)
Criticisms or commiserations welcome?

CamStudio(again) part 2

Here is the second part which will be followed by the post rendering video clips with some caveats as to what you need to do in CamStudio, VirtualDubMod and Super

CamStudio again (part 1)

After losing two lots of text here ( the first when an upload failed and the second when I tried a save and continue editing but lost my tokens on the save and publish.......yeesh!) I will not repeat any of the reasons I did at second different project.
I will inform you that in VirtualDubMod the Region captures and Full Screen captures cannot be appended without some conversion of the former to the same resolution of the later ( and subsequent degradation of quality. Therefore I have included the AutoPanning clip as a separate podcast. This may lead to some continuity issues in this podcast.
CamStudio's Shockwave Flash Converter, while great at reducing size ( >1GB file down to 3, 35 MB, chained files which will play in succession) was incompatible with Podbean and I could not convert the SWFs to FLVs in Super (codec.........don't really care at this point). So I created a FLV from the original AVIs and it was massive ( max limit 30MB at Podbean). Therefore I had to split the FLV with another sourceforge app flvsplitter. I guess I should have just used Jing and kept it to 5 minutes though I find this quite limiting. Again the KISS principle was not adhered to  and it caused me (minor) grief.

The Vpod I couldn't make with CamStudio

Here is what I intended to do which CamStudio did not allow............post production

Commmunities of Practise

In the interest of just getting these thoughts down in some format that can be shared, I have just put the unedited version of my thoughts on the paper by M.K Smith  'Commuinities of Practiceup here for the sake of completeness for he Emerging Technologies course. Excuse the rough nature and lack of well scripted or coherency. I figured as long as I chime in at least someone can criticize of point out inconsistencies in my ideas. Better to participate than lurk I always say. Here's hoping I can be somewhat more lucid and focused in the next podcast.

Criticisms/Dislikes CamStudio

Little did I realize that it would be more work to script and create small clips which I could combine and then add audio from Audacity. Here are all the 'silent video podcasts' that I did before I realized that this was not what CamStudio had in mind for me!
A problem encountered(for which I should have known better ) was that the screen capture resolution for my laptop (1440 X900) was not really compatible with the clip I took of myself (740 X 480 ). So even if I wanted to combine them and add an audio track it would mean more converting ( Super is a great way to do this for free). Time is too valueable to me to waste with conversions.
Also, before I went to upload the swf that CamStudio converts , I saw that flash is not a compatible mode. Back to Super to create the flv files that have a 740 X 480 Pixel Dimension. I may have to increase this in the Completed authored version in another post here
I didn't like Camstudio for the fact that you could not edit out or insert or combine clips to pull out gaffs, or just make the presentation more professional. It had to be all 'stream of conscisouness' pre-planned and rn through many times to get your 'lesson' polished. I finally gave up on the Screen annotations as they would have to be planned well in advance and executed with precise timing as to keep you on track with your video lesson.CamStudio does not have authoring abilities or joining of the native avi, There are free apps ( Virtualdub etc) that can do this but it's a lot more work. I would gladly pay for a $100 software package to have the flexiblity to be able to create smaller, discreet clips and join/combine them and add audio tracks afterward.
Also the CRAM codec that CamStudio uses to create it's avi's should be CRAMMED somewhere but I am too much a getnleman to say where. It will not let the avis be player in Media player, Divx palyer, VLC and others. I have my laptop loaded with every encoder/decoder that there is because I need it for multimedia classes I teach so when I have to go through all this work to produce a video poadcast I would give CamStudio a failing grade ( even for free software).
Those less tech savvy would be pulling their own heads off with this software. I was overheard uttering many an expletive myself.
I guess as long as you need simple straight foward screen captures this might work. Once you want to go beyond this you are boned.
After another day of messing around with video bitrates due to CamStudio's codec and incompatiblities I can truly say I will NEVER use CamStudio again for anything. I will also be getting rid of the resource hogging, crash prone, piece of crud know as Pinnacle Studio. Absoutlely not worth the effort and frustration. It simpy does not do a good job with avis. When rendering movies I experienced blank and green screens and sound drop outs and many times it couldn't find Mp4 dlls. Unforgiveable for a purchased software package.