Tutorial 2: Equipment and software for vlog production
Page history last edited by Richard Beach2 yrs ago
Tutorial 2. Equipment/software for vlog production
For this second tutorial, I’ll be discussing the equipment and software that you’ll be using in creating your vlog posts, material that is discussed in Chapter 3 of your Secrets of Videoblogging text.
You also need to realize that your final vlog production will only be about 5 or 6 minutes at the most (if you posting it on YouTube, you have a 10 minute limit). So, you may only need to shoot for about 7 to 8 minutes at the most—assuming that you will edit down your vlog.
In the next module, I’ll be discussing how to use the equipment to record your video, followed by another module on how to edit your video.
Cameras
For filming your vlog posts, you can also certainly use your own digital still cameras if they have a video component. You can also use you own camcorder; one advantage of camcorders is the flip viewer is useful for recording yourself, for example, as you are filming yourself as you are walking down a street or through a building.
You can use your laptop if it has a webcam in it or hook up a webcam to your computer, for example, the iSight camera on a Mac computer. To create these vlogs, I’m using my MacBook. I put my script on my desktop Mac directly in front of me but record into my MacBook.
One advantage of using a Mac computer with a webcam is that you can open up iMovie and record right into iMovie for further editing. On iMovie, you simply move the button from edit to record (the video camera icon) and push down on the space bar. When you’re done recording a certain segment, push down the space bar again, and the clip of that segment appears in the clip box. (I’ll talk more about recording in the next module).
If your Mac computer does not have a webcam built into it, you can just plug in a UVC-compliant webcam into a Mac that has OS X 10.4.9 (for a list of webcams: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2390). If you have at least OS 10.3, you can purchase the Ecamm Network iChatUSBCam 2.2.1 (http://www.macworld.com/1637).
If you don’t have a webcam, your other option is just to hook up your camcorder with a FireWire cable to your computer and iChat AV should indicate that the camera is recording (Breen, 2007, p. 92). You need to make sure that the camera doesn’t switch off by removing the tape, turning off any energy-saving option, or putting it into single-image capture mode.
The Kodak Easyshare Z885
Kodak Easyshare Z885 cameras. For students in these two courses, if you do not have access to a digital camera, some of you will be using the Kodak Easyshare Z885 digital cameras from the C & I Curriculum Library located in the basement of Peik Hall next to the pop machines and is opened until 7:30.
These cameras were purchased from a grant I received so that you can check out cameras for an extended time period to use in creating videos. Unfortunately, there are 12 cameras available for use in two courses, so there will probably not be a camera available for each of you. You and your blog partner may also want to share a camera.
Features of the Kodak Easyshare cameras. Let me highlight some of the features of the Kodak Easyshare cameras relevant for creating vlogs. Although it is a still camera, this camera has a video component that can be saved as .mp4 files that you can use to create video and then download into a computer.
To use the Kodak Easyshare Z885, you can get the User Manual online;
You can also go through the Kodak Easyshare System Tutorials that tell you how to use the controller button for setting your picture quality, deleting and saving pictures, protecting pictures from being deleted, and other features: http://www.kodak.com/global/en/service/tutorials/index.jhtml?pq-path=4688
When you check out the camera, and are using your own computer, make sure that you also check out the CD with the Kodak EasyShare software on it (if you’re using the mobile lab computers, the software will be on those computers). You’ll need to upload the Kodak software into your computer so that you can hook up the camera to your computer.
For uploading photos to the Kodak EasyShare Gallery, you should get the Firefox add-on, the Firefox Companion for Kodak EasyShare Gallery. This will allow you to upload photos directly to your Gallery to create albums: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4441
The Kodak Easyshare camera comes with a 2GB card, which is a lot of memory, which means that can typically shoot for an extended period of time. The more memory on your card, the longer you can record without having to download to your computer.
Shooting video
To shoot video, you need to select the video option and then press the Shutter button down to record; to stop recording press the Shutter button again:
Once you’ve recorded, you then have 5 seconds to decide if you want to keep the recording.
When you’re reviewing, you will see the following icons:
To zoom in and out, use the W and T buttons in the upper right hand corner
If you want to record yourself without holding the camera, you can set the self-timer:
To review your video, press the review button and the left-right buttons to locate the video you want. Then press the down button to play the video:
To delete video, press the delete button.
To create a single print from your video, press review, then menu to find Make Picture:
To edit in the camera to trim material you don’t want, go to review, then menu, then Edit Video, then Trim
For creating photos for your posts, you would obviously just use the camera as a still digital camera.
Canon camcorders
You can also check out for a short time period (2-3 days) the Canon camcorders: the Canon Elura series & Canon ZR Series (for downloadable copies of the manuals, go to the Library site:
When you check out the camcorders, make sure that you also check out a FireWire cable for importing your video into your computer and the AC adaptor. The camcorders are particularly useful for self-interviewing if you are moving about on a site because of the flip-out video viewer.
The Library also has Sony Cybershot DSC-P50 or DSC-P32 still cameras available that have a video component, but they have no sound recording capacity, so they won’t work for creating vlogs. If you want to use one of your own still digital cameras, make sure that it has sound recording capabilitity.
Tripods
You can check out one of the 5 tripods from the Library
You may want to have access to an external microphone for recording voice-overs directly in to the iMovie audio track. You can check out external microphones from the Library; there is one VHF Wireless Microphone: Audio-Technica Pro 88W available and 3 PZM Microphones Crown SoundGrabber II Hemispherical Condenser Microphone.
You may also want to obtain a microphone for your computer, for example, a headset microphone, which you can also get a Radio Shack.
Video files eat up a lot of space. While you can store them on your computer, if your computer doesn’t have a lot of space, you may want to store them elsewhere. Or, if you’re using the mobile laptops in class or in the lab, you won’t be able to store you Windows Movie Maker or iMovie files on those computers, you will then need to store your files elsewhere. You can store them on DVD discs, but you can only store them on one disc at a time. The better option is to purchase a 2 GB USB Flash drive from the U Bookstore or Target; here’s some of the options at Target:
If you’re going to doing a lot of video production, you may want even more storage, so you’d want to get a portable external hard drive—which you can get for about $50.00 - $70.00.
You other option is to store your files on the University server—you have up to 1 GB of space. To store files, you must move the files to your space on the server using SFTP or FTP software. For information on transferring files, go to
You’re also going to need to set up your blog, in most cases, using Blogger. I won’t be spending time in this tutorial on setting up your blog; here’s some useful sites on how to do so:
for easy right-click posting to a range of different blog platforms, including Blogger. For example, you come across interesting story or news item on the web. You may want to share the introductory section from that story (not the whole story—if it is copyrighted). However, you don’t want to bother with opening up your blog. You can use JustBlogIt by highlighting a section of the story you want to appear on your post and then right click to post it on your blog.
You can also post YouTube videos directly to Blogger by going to your YouTube Settings and selecting Blogger as your option. Then, when you view any video, you will see a download option for posting to your blog.
Using browser add-ons to capture Web material. You can also use an add-on to your Firefox or Internet Explorer called Yoono that allows you to “buzz” text, images, and video into a window to then send to your blog: http://www.yoono.com/releases/ff/4.0.2/
Let’s say that you’re out and about and realize that you want to take a photo or video of something, but you don’t have your camera. You can then use your cell phone and send that photo or video to your blog—what is described as moblogging. In Moblogging, you are posting material to your blog from a remote location. You are sending your picture or video to an email account that then posts it to the blog. To create moblogs for Blogger, you need to set up an account at go.blogger.com: http://www.blogger.com/mobile-start.g
You can set up a new blog with go.blogger or use your existing Blogger account. You can then use your email or cell phone to send your material to go@blogger.com; you also need to log in to go.blogger.com to provide them with your Blogger account information and enter the token we sent to your phone.
Here’s the phone services supported by go.blogger.com:
A key question terms of submitting videos, is whether your cell-phone serve include what is known as Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) to send photos and/or video to your email account (Dedman & Paul, 2006). Sprint’s service is called PCS Vision while Verizon calls it Video & PIX Messaging.
You can also email material to your blog using mail2entry
Another strategy for importing photos to your blog involves the use of Flickr, a photo sharing site owned by Yahoo on which you can get a free account to store your photos. You first need to set up an account with Flickr at http://flickr.com by creating an account on Yahoo. To use Flickr for uploading your images, and how to add descriptions and the all-important tags, here’s Flickr tutorial:
You can search for photos on Flickr according to categories or titles. You can also search for photos using tags—which are categories assigned to images; images can have more than one tag. To find tags, pull down the Explore menu to select popular tags; you can also find tags at http://flickr.com/photos/tags
One type of tags are those photos linked to a specific place, for example, Minneapolis—what is called geotagging. For geotagging your photos with Flickr: associating them with a specific place on a world map
You cannot use copyrighted images on your blog, but you can use images that have a Creative Commons copyright; to find only images with the Creative Commons copyright: http://flickr.com/creativecommons
Once you have set up your Flickr page, go to Your Blogs and set up a link to your blog. You can then obtain an email address for use with your cell phone. Add that address to your phone’s address book to send in photos to Flickr and then your blog.
Part 3: See the following Video
Software for viewing video
If you don’t already have software for viewing videos installed on your own computer, you’ll need to download that software. You should have the latest version of QuickTime, to play .mov and .mp4 files, in this case QuickTime 7 http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/
You should then go into QuickTime Preferences to open System Preferences. Then go to the MIME Settings to open plugin settings and, under video, check all of the options. You will also need the latest version of Windows Media Players for playing .wmv and .wmf files.
You can also add these different software as Firefox plugins:
Rather than having to go out and search for blogs or vlogs, you can subscribe to what are known as RSS feeds for subscribing to blogs and vlogs. RSS feeds are a way to capture posts from a blog or vlogs based on your subscriptions.
The first thing that you need to do is to create a place to view your RSS feeds. An RSS Reader such as Bloglines or Google Reader provides you with lists of blogs or vlogs you’ve subscribed to. Each time these readers are updated, you will get the most recent posts for these blogs. For students in the media studies class, see the section in the Richardson book on setting up Bloglines.
You can download Bloglines http://www.bloglines.com or Google Reader from http://www.google.com/reader/ (you’ll need to set up an account with Google). For lists of other feedreaders and tutorials on setting up feeds:
Once you have created your Bloglines or Google Reader accounts, then, you should first obtain feeds from your blog partner’s blog and other blogs in the course. The feed for my digital writing blog is
As mentioned in the last module, there are also RSS readers specific for vlogs that allow to view videos on their sites, as well as download videos for viewing on your video iPod or iPhone. As described in your book on pages 19-33, the major vlog RSS readers or aggregators are Mefeedia http://mefeedia.com, FireAnt http://fireant.tv and iTunes http://www.apple.com/itunes
For example, for those of you interested in teaching writing, I recommend the Teachers Teaching Teachers podcast, featuring teachers associated with National Writing Project sites discussing uses of technology in teaching K-12 writing: http://teachersteachingteachers.org/
Or, if you’re interested in issues related to academic uses of instructional technology, you could subscribe to Digital Campus http://digitalcampus.tv/
Part 4: Recording, Editing, and Storing your Video (see video below):
Software for editing your video
I now turn to some of the software you’re going to need for editing your videos: iMovie and Windows Movie Maker; you will need to download one of these programs.
Here’s an introductory tutorial from Freevlog on the software you’ll need for editing/compressing vlogs.
One advantage of using iMovie with Macs with iSight webcams is that you can record your video right into iMovie. When you open up iMovie, you just set video (the icon with a camera) instead of edit. You can also use iChat AV to conduct online videoconferences with people to then include in your video.
Once you’re done editing, you then need to save your project. You will then go to File and select Export to compress your file in iMovie. It’s important that you select “Expert Setting”—the last option and not the other options. You should then see the following screen—so you can save your file as a Quicktime file to the desktop to upload to Media Mill or to your computer or flash drive.
You can also use Windows Movie Maker—the software in the 355 and 325 Peik PC computer lab, that does many of the same things as iMovie (you'll be receiving a set of directions on a handout on how to use WMM in the lab). When you start up WMM, you need to turn on the webcam on the top of the screen so that you should then see yourself on the screen. You can then record your video and then edit it using WMM by dragging clips into the strip along the bottom. You can then save it and upload it to Media Mill for storage and compression (leave some time for this—longer files may take a good while). You can also save it on your 2 GB flash drive—may sure that you create two folders to save the file—a project file and storage file. You can obtain help on doing this from the lab assistant—on Thursday morning, the assistant is Yang Lin.
I’ll be discussing use of iMovie and Movie Maker for editing your video in the fourth module on editing your video.
Uploading your video to your blog
In the 4th module, I’ll be discussing how you will be storing and compressing down your video to add to your blog. For Blogger has a new feature that allows you to simply simply post your video directly into your blog using the upload video option next to the image upload on Blogger.
Using YouTube
One option that involves wider distribution of your video is to store your video on YouTube and then post the YouTube URL into your blog (you have a limit of 10 minutes or 100 MB for any video on YouTube). To do so, you’ll also going to need to set up an account with YouTube http://www.youtube.com. You could also use Google Video http://video.google.com, Mefeedia http://mefeedia.com
or Blip TV http://blip.tv/file/post/ or any of the other sites discussed in the Secrets of Videoblogging book.
When you’re viewing videos, note the different options for saving to favorites, adding to groups, sharing the video via email, or posting a video to your blog.
You register by going to the Member Login box and the sign up link. After you have subscribed, you then want to for configure YouTube for posting to your blog. You should go to the My Account link and then to the Account Settings. Then click on Video Posting Settings and then Add Blog/Site.
Then, click on Blogger and enter into Blogger user name and password. and Click on Add Blog.
You can then post your own or any other non-copyrighted video to your blog. Once you select a video, if you’ve registered for a blog link, underneath the video, you should see a Post Video option. When you click on Post Video, you then see a box with your blog. Add a title for your post and add text you want to describe the video. Then click on on Post to Blog.
You can also also add videos to blogs, wikis, or websites by copy and pasting the code in the “Embed” box. For example, in PBwiki, when you click on Plugins, select the YouTube option. Then, copy and paste the code into the pop-up box.
You can also use YouTube to record your video on a webcam directly into YouTube using the YouTube Quick Capture. You need to go to “Upload videos” and provide information about your video. You then select “Use Quick Capture” and then click “Record.” You video will then be stored on YouTube. You can then copy the “embed” code to your blog or post directly into Blogger.
If you’re going to be creating a series of videos, you can created you own Channel or personal profile on YouTube that itself can serve as a vlog. Explore others’ Channels by clicking a person’s name; you can then subscribe to that person’s channel. You can personalize your channel page in your My Account page.
You can also use YouTube to create a vlog (Miller, 2007). click on Playlists in My box, the select a playlist or create a new playlist to create a vlog. Then click on the Set as Vlog button—your vlog then is on your channel profile page as a series of your videos.
You can also use YouTube as a teaching tool (although many districts block access to it). To become familiar with YouTube, explore the different tabs for browsing videos: videos, categories, channels, and community. Note also that, as in Flickr, you can tag videos to store in My Favorites—here’s where you can keep videos for use in teaching.
Uploading your video to your blog using Media Mill
So where will you be able to store your big files other than on your computer or 2GB flash drive? You’re be storing and compressing your files on the University’s Media Mill, something that I’ll be discussing in the 4th video on editing your videos.
Once you've completed editing on iMovie or Windows Movie Maker, you'll export or share your file using the "Quality" option to Media Mill. The limitation is that it takes a long time to upload files in the "Quality" option from home--several hours for a large file, so you need to set aside some time to do this. (There's other faster storage options, including storing files on YouTube--but you're limited to 100 MB files).
In the 4th module, I’ll be discussing how you will be storing and compressing down your video on the University’s Media Mill site to add to your blog.
When you log onto Media Mill you will select either Mac or PC and then create a little mill icon that will go on your desktop.
You then go to “upload videos” on Media Mill and you’ll be given a user name (a number) and password. You’ll then add that information and drag
your file into the Files box and then click on upload.
Remember, you need to allow for a good period of time for this upload: for a 150 MB file, from your home computer, it may take about 45 minutes.
Once you store and compress your videos on Media Mill, you then click on the little round icon to create “Derivatives”—in this case, you select Quicktime 7: small (refresh your computer to move this process along). This will then create both a much compressed Quicktime file (about a tenth the size of your original file) to upload to your blog or YouTube as well as a file with HTML code to cut and paste to your blog or YouTube.
To do so on Blogger:
“When you go to the Blogger post editor, you'll see a new button () next to the image uploading one. Just select a video from your computer, wait a few minutes for the upload and processing to occur, and voila! Now when you visit your blog, you will see something like this (of course without Tomo, the Blogger Akita)” http://buzz.blogger.com/2007/08/3-2-1-action.html
Tutorial 2: Equipment and software for vlog production
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