I know many of you have asked me in the past (no, not recently, probably because you've given up on me) to please improve the iMovie output quicktime settings so they'd be better than the "email" default compression/resizing settings.

Well now I'm working on productions for other people, and I hate to be a dork and choose something hastily for someone else's use. Can't bring myself do it actually. So I'm hoping that some of you can bring me up to speed quickly over the next few days so I can make some sensible decisions.

I will post what I learn here.

wow now I really gotta goto bed :-)

thankzzzzzz

Almost a month ago, I asked you guys to email me your movies to demo@vemobile.com and let me know the ID number the Type Pad/Video Egg service emailed back to you, so I could use it within my Type Pad blog and do some kind of collaborative video thing.

Not one person emailed me about this, and I find that kind of hard to believe. Now I would appreciate it if those of you who almost did it didn't, for one reason or another. Do you just now have video cell phones? (I sure don't, so I can understand that :-)

I'm wondering what will happen if I email a non-cell phone video to the same address, so I'm going to try that, and just make it a small enough file so it won't upset any file size limitations.

I'm also wondering what people think about these flash-only solutions for video hosting that seem to be popping up everywhere. Does it bother anybody but me that the video can't be reused once it's compressed and locked up in this way?

I'll let you know how it goes. But please, if you have a second, give me some feedback on one or both of these issues at lisa@lisarein.com

thanks!

Update - 11-11-05 - OK I haven't received one email from you guys - is it that you don't have time? That you can't email movies from your phone? That you think your movies aren't good enough? :-)

No seriously, just shoot some video and email it to "demo@vemobile.com" and then wait to get the SMS message back, retrieve it, and email me at "lisa@lisarein.com" with the Video ID number. -- thanks!

I've been messing around with Type Pad's new video upload feature, courtesy of Video Egg, but my friends close by with camera phones are having trouble emailing their videos to me...

So I'm just going to put out a general call to my readers to please email their camera phone video to demo@vemobile.com, and then email me the "Video ID" they will SMS back to you. Then I can enter it into my test blog interface. (See my test blog here to bring up the clip.)

So far, I'm both excited and discouraged by this video upload implementation. It's definitely exciting for Type Pad to offer this kind of service -- a packaged blogging and video upload service.
It's the right idea, for sure. But there are a few annoying details of the implementation.

For instance, only clips of two minutes or less are permitted (which greatly reduces the probability of my using the service, to be honest), but that's not my main concern, which is this; I have a problem with the use of Flash as the delivery format, because it effectively kills any hope for reuse of the video footage.

In addition, Video Egg is compressing the video before it wraps it up in Flash, and the effect it has on the video is quite significant.

Check out the original version of this clip (Wendy Seltzer from Foo Camp 2003). Then compare it to the VideoEgged version on my typepad blog.

Nevertheless, this development is quite significant, and I'm looking forward to testing out the Mobile upload feature. I had to borrow a PC from a friend, since Type Pad's Video Egg plug-in doesn't work on the Macintosh platform yet. There are some features I haven't tested yet, like the Digital Camera upload, or the Mobile Phone upload, which I hope you're going to help me sort out today and tomorrow (while I've got my friend's PC laptop close by).

Thanks in advance for sending me some great videos!

lisa

It's my first new post for O'Reilly's Digital Media website:

How To Shoot Broadcast Quality Music Videos On A Camera Phone

This is a pretty neat story from beginning to end -- a lesson in what can be accomplished when someone sticks to a vision and sees it through to the end. Right on to Blast Records and The Presidents of the United States of America (P.U.S.A.) for taking a chance too!

Check out the Making Of video that Grant let me host, too.

This development is more than a novelty. It's a working demonstration of the natural artistic progression towards the integration of new mobile video technology within existing art forms.

I predict that it will soon be commonplace for bands to shoot mobile phone-based video of interviews, practices, performances, songs-in-progress, or whatever, and post it to their websites...

Mobile phone cameras can only record at 1/3000 of standard broadcast quality, and don't capture movement very well. In addition these phones only recorded at 10 frames per second, even though the manufacturer had promised that they'd record at 15 fps.

During the shoot, the phones were so temperamental that they'd just turn off at any point without warning, so Grant had the band play the song 24 times at half speed in order to provide enough footage to edit together one good take of the song.

Well it's time for another family purchase, and, as always, I'm depending on you to help me make the right decision.

We need something with either firewire and rca outputs, if possible -- so they can hook it in through their VCR or download to a computer.

Good sound is important too -- of course :-)

thanks in advance for the usual great advice!

remember my email is:
lisa@lisarein.com

Update 11:30 pm: The answer turned out to be to just mount my camera like a hard drive on my computer and copy the .avi files right over to my hard drive.

Thanks a lot guys! You've come through for me again. Thanks a bunch!

Hey guys I can really use your help here. I can't figure out how to get the movies out of my Casio Exlim Ex-S3. I movie doesn't seem to recognize it as a camera.

Thanks in advance for any help you can give me via comments or email at lisarein@finetuning.com.

peace!

lisa

Hey dudes,

Okay so I'm still trying to get a grip on using my new equipement and software to rip the nice DVDs people have been sending me in order to make .mov files suitable for my archive. Thanks to all of you that have been trying to help me out. It's going slow, but I'm figuring it out.

Here's a nice tutorial that Pete whipped up for me for MPEG Streamclip. I'll be blogging the clip I've made so far and some other stuff in a second before going to Wide Hive for the morning. Then I'm back on the case this afternoon.

peace,

lisa

Hey Lisa,

I just wanted to give you instructions on how to rip DVDs to
Quicktime. OK, here we go:

1) Go here:
http://www.videohelp.com/tools?tool=663#comments (Videohelp.com is a GREAT site--I've learned everything I know from
them.)

2) Download the app "MPEG Streamclip."

3) Once you've unpacked it (it's tiny) go ahead and open it.

4) Now open your DVD like a data disc.

5) Drag the VOB file you want to rip to the app and drop it on the app
(or on the icon in the dock).

6) When I did it with the original copy of the Daily Show DVD I sent
you, I ripped the fourth track which was the episode with Richard
Clarke. Before I ripped, I got an error message mentioning Time Code
breaks. Follow the error message's in structions and go to Edit>Fix
Timecode Breaks or just hit command+F. I'm not sure what this does,
but it makes it so you will rip more than the first minute or so of
the episode.

7) Once it's done fixing the timecode (if you get that error) go to
File>Export to Quicktime. From there you'll see a window with a bunch
of options. I haven't figured out what all of them mean, but I do
know you can pick your compressor in the pulldown at the top and then
decide what kind of quality you want the clip to have with that
slider. Below that, you can choose what resolution you want your
video to have. Beyond those three things, I'm a still learning.

One of you suggested that I check out the $25 a month video tutorials at to ramp up on my Final Cut Pro.

That's the best $25 I've spent in a long time. I'll probably keep my subscription up to help support (not to mention that there are other titles of stuff I want to learn).

It took about a lesson and a half for me to get off and running on my project. (About 30 min of instruction at most.) I'm pretty impressed.

The way the courses are organized, I can move ahead to find out what I need to know, and go back to learn more of the introductory stuff, as needed. There are little 15 minute movies for everything. You can just pick what you need from the index.

Leave it to you guys to hook me up with another great resource!

Thanks again for all the great advice.

(What would I do without cha? :-)

Hey gang. Thanks for all the great advice regarding this post.

I ended up buying an Academic version of Final Cut Pro. (I am, after all, a graduate student :-)

I could use links to any good tutorials anyone might know of. I'm just trying to do really simple stuff: edit clips, over dub music, stuff like that.

Thanks again everybody. There doesn't seem to be anything you guys can't fill me in on!

Note that I ended up getting Final Cut Pro.