Video Project

After working on the last video project, I felt pretty confident about editing and putting together a video. May initial problem with this assignment was coming up with a topic. I eventually decided to make a video about making videos. A few months ago I had my students make short movies with their cell phones. It ended up being a disaster of an assignment. First of all, the content of the videos was quite poor. The students were either too silly or completely boring. The rest of the videos we were unable to watch because of technical difficulties. I found the students had no idea how get the video off their phones, edit the video, or submit the video at school for viewing. I decided to make my video about how to make a good video with instructions from actual students.

I'd been looking for a way to have my students experiment with Jing. I asked them to make a Jing video discussing 1 of 3 things (getting video from cell phone to computer, getting video from home to school, or how to make a good video) for extra credit. While some of the videos weren't great, I had enough good stuff to use for my video. I got all motivated and excited and started to work on my project. Then I realized I'd made a huge mistake. The Jing files are stored on the student's accounts. I tried to convert the .swf files in Any Video Converter using the url like I do with YouTube videos. This didn't work at all. I tried a few other free converters and nothing worked. I finally found a forum where it was explained that Jing embeds a player in the .swf file so it is nearly impossible to convert.

I ended up having to record the videos again. Because I wanted to use iMovie, I needed the files in Quicktime or .mp4. I downloaded Camtasia for Mac but it has a bug in the current release and wouldn't export to Quicktime. I finally used a screen recording software called Snapz. It allows a 15 day trial and costs $69 (much cheaper than Camtasia). It records still shots or records Quicktime video. The software does not have the editing features Camtasia does. However, it is nice that it is automatically a Quicktime file. After re-recording the student videos, I was able to drag and drop into iMovie. Because most of my video was created by my students on Jing, the video doesn't have the best quality or camera angles.

After rerecording the videos, I was able to start the editing process. I quickly discovered iMovie has a few limitations. Because it is free, it doesn't have the layering and effects capabilities of a program like Final Cut. I needed to blur some places where students had used their full names or passwords. This is not something you can do in iMovie. I was able to use SnagIt to blur a few names in still shots, but the ones in videos I was not able to do. Camtasia also has some blurring and call out effects but I wasn't able to use them on my videos because of my Quicktime export problems.

I also had to create some slides in Power Point and convert them to jpegs when I wanted to use text. iMovie allows some text to be inserted, but you usually can't control where it goes. It also limits the amount of text. I'm probably going to purchase Final Cut so that I can work with more effects and layering.