Despite ripping me for writing a blog my brother who has been given a yacht to use in the Caribbean for 5 months along with James Martin (kite tester for kiteworld magazine, sponsored rider and male model, no big deal!!) has decided to document their trip by writing their own WordPress blog, Wind Waves and Caribbean Raves. To add an extra dimension and make use of the fact that they have been cross referencing anchor spots with windsurfing, surfing and kitesurfing locations. They wanted to include some kind of map.
So, here’s how to use Google Maps My Maps function to create your own custom maps and embed them in the blog posts, not oly that I will explain how to embed extra media such as a YouTube video into the Map.
Sign into your Google account, under the Google Maps logo in the top left hand part of the page click on My Maps and then Create new map. Give it a title and description, in the edit mode you have the option to draw on the map, drop a pin or grab and navigate the map. I have created a map as an example, using some footage I shot at Gwithian beach in Cornwall the other week I then chose the html option on the push pin and embedded the share code from Youtube.
View Video Beach Guide in a larger map
I didn’t realise that this was an unknown to many but often there is a need to pull things out of PowerPoint for alternative uses rather than put them in. This is often the case for me when produce video reports where the findings have been visualised in PowerPoint. So, it’s as simple as this, File > Save As > under the naming form fill change the drop down to png or jpg and hit save, you will then be prompted current slide or every slide, choose every slide and each slide in he deck will be saved as a separate picture or image.
If you just require an element if the slide you can right click and save as image in much the same way.
Top tip,
If your output proposed use is a higher quality than the resolution of the ppt you can often scale up your deck to A3, any vector graphics will be re sized and the quality of the output increased. Go, File > Page Setup and adjust the page accordingly.
The time has come to make the decision. HD or not to HD? And for those still getting mixed up, HD is High Definition and HDD is Hard Disc Drive, be sure you know the difference when you are purchasing you video camera! For a few reasons I have still been shooting in SD (Standard Definition) for corporate and by corporate I mean presentation video output (video for PowerPoint etc) File size being one, especially as I have footage backed up from my edit suite to a server daily and then an off site tape backup. Also, shooting to DV tapes provided a simple short term backup solution. Many of the videos produced are also not to be viewed on a television but accompanying information on a PowerPoint slide, so is often shown at in smaller dimension.
The thing is, more and more, stand alone presentation pieces are played on the desktop or from an online portal with the ability to display at full screen, now obviously standard definition is 720 x 576 against most monitor screen dimensions being at least 1024 px wide, in which case a SD is stretched to fit the screen causing massive pixelation.
A point to note that file compression is much better than it used to be so producing HD videos as mpeg4 with a h.264 codec has less file size implications and doesn’t cause your machine to grind to a halt when you try and play it back on desktop software.
My final point in my HD or not to HD argument that is fast leaning toward A HD win is that of Hardware. Even prosumer HDD cameras like the Everio have moved away from mere TV playback through your AV cables but not record in edit suite friendly formats. This means, drag and drop functionality that saves hours on your production work flow and produces better output.
I am running a pilot to monitor the success of new media approaches to recruitment while recruiting for my assistant. During the research process I came across a few findings that were worth a note.
The flip side to recruiting on the Internet, despite the fact that a particular platform does not represent a true overview of a countries demographic, but what does? is the simple fact that even those using conventional practices for recruitment for vetting. It makes a lot of sense! In the past you’d get references to discover whether your candidate has a good work ethic, is not going to create problems etc but social media is quicker and provides a more rounded summary as the candidate has not chosen the referee who speaks on their behalf and in many cases are more open with there posted information. The problem lies with the discarding of candidates for reasons you have discovered via these means, it might not necessarily be the HR department doing this but the individual departments conducting the interview process who are taking an unnecessary risk on behalf of the company. Fair enough if you discover someone is a drug taker, criminal etc but what if discover the candidate is planning a pregnancy, has an alternative sexual preference etc and they are discarded. If you have decided to do your online research then be sure the reason the candidate was discarded can be back up with valid reasoning and in many cases proof of this.
I have now a couple of times been asked how tweeting using a hashtag can be applied to the event / conference / debate situation. I was at a debate the other month where I experienced this for the first time. A hashtag to the event is given out before hand so that everyone in the audience or even those who are interested in the event could search the keyword and see a stream if you like from the people in the room or as I mentioned those people who could not be in the room but would like to comment on what was going on. The result was a conversation around the conversation / presentation and a commentary for those who couldn’t attend without too many rude interruption to the preceding. Often someone in the audience may have a comment but aren’t quite brave enough to develop this into a question, this provides a harmless way for them to offer their thoughts to those thinking along the same lines.
You will quickly learn if you are outputting video for a client who is bound to feed back and expect changes to adapt an editing technique that allows you to go back, find footage you might have deleted from the timeline, jump to another camera angle at a certain point or reconnect audio that you had discarded. Often the people making the decisions do not understand the choices you made and insist on something else, for this reason it is important to take a photoshop technique to editing in a way that is non destuctive. Here’s a few tips.
At capture stage be sure not to be too precise with your timecodes, always capture with ample handles and this sometimes means shooting a little more at the begininning and end of each clip, this will not only allow for better constructed transitions but also save the annoyance of not being able to extend the clip that extra little bit to fit to the timing of the edit.
Always keep you original files as raw and unedited as possible. Do not apply effects on the camera or work on the footage in another program and save it down, keep your editing options as versitile as possible.
Re order! Don’t delete! I often shoot a presentation on two cameras and sync the two. If you have made a decision about which camera the viewer will see, keep the unused clip but place it on the layer below in the timeline or on a hidden layer. There’s always some who might say, can we have this camera at this point? Just because they can!
If you are working with graphics then Adobe Premiere Pro is great for importing images or projects both psd’s and aep’s directly in the timeline but be sure when you right click and edit in Photoshop or After Effects you don’t make irreversible changes, always make a backup copy and work in layers so you turn on and off elements at will.
There are many little tips and tricks to speed up your repetitive editing processes but one of the main things I find is to get used to working in numbers for resizing, scaling positioning etc
One of the major pluses to editing using premiere pro is the ability to drag and drop different video formats straight into you project and then on into the timeline, no rendering and no re encoding video to a specific .mov file but this means you’ll often need to re size clips. You can set this to automatic as you bring it into the timeline but I often like to do this manually and refreme the shot too.
I work with a notepad in front of me and any values I think I will repeatedly need in that project I jot down. This is also a good tip for scaling over time, timecodes, clip lengths and color values. It might seem obvious but on a large project it’s amazing the amount of time and frustration it can save. I’ve included a screen grab where you might find this useful in the video effects tab.
I might be preaching to the converted on this one but if you are one of those people who if you wanted an album or tune you would just search it on iTunes and buy it, there’s plenty of sites now with mp3 downloads way beyond the standard price. I first discovered this when searching hotukdeals, linked through to Play.com and bought Cream Future Trance for £2.99 which is now one of the most played albums on my iPhone. Now I check Play, Amazon, HMV with a quick look on find-cd before just getting it from iTunes. Amazon have even developed a little download software that make the process almost as easy as downloading it from iTunes!
Ok, I didn’t manage to get this to work completely but as I think it might be down to the network I am going to post it anyway. I almost managed to stream the music from my MacBook Pro (iTunes) through the Xbox 360. The idea of this is to have all music in one central location to avoid duplication of songs and double handling when it comes to updates.
Also, if you don’t have your mac set up to run a Windows environment or need to improve your Bootcamp set up follow my blog post that talked about an easy installation of VM Fusion using your Bootcamp partitioned drive. I did need to import the Bootcamp Partition in order to mirror the music folder in OSX and Windows.
I didn’t use the medialink streaming server software, instead I opened up VMFusion and loaded Windows Media Player. In the VMFusion Setting found under Virtual Machine I then turned on folder sharing and mirrored the music folder where the iTunes Media folder resides. By doing this I was able to use the Add to Media Library under File In Windows media player in order list all my music without actually copying anything over into this environment.
Next, make sure all you media sharing is turned on in the windows environment (I’m using Vista) you can do this via Library > Media Sharing > Share my media to: in Windows Media Player, the Xbox 360 icon should appear in the box below, or choose Control Panel > Classic View > Networking and sharing > Media Sharing > Change.
With everything on, turn on your XBox 360. Go to My Xbox > Music Library and select your computer, you should see your playlists…. problem is, mine won’t play!!
If anyone can get ths working please expand in the comments area?
See how I got this to work on the PS3
Probably the most common problem I am faced with week in week out is video failing to play in a PowerPoint presentation. Here are a few of the checks to perform to get things working.
Firstly, PowerPoint does not physically bring the video file into your presentation as it does an image. Hit save after embedding and notice the PowerPoint file does not grow in memory size. Therefore the presentation always needs to know where the video is relative to the document. Always keep the video file in the same place as the PowerPoint file and get into the habit of moving the parent folder around as you move the presentation from computer to computer.
Secondly, there is a bug in PowerPoint, if you see the white square when you play the video there is a good chance this is caused by there being too many characters in the video file name, I did read somewhere that over 128 characters but I find this differs from machine to machine. If you ate one of those people who put your videos in a folder named movies or something then include this parent folder in this rule.
Lastly, I sometimes get problems when a presentation is built on a company network and again this differs from machine to machine. If the above doesn’t work try moving the presentation to your desktop or local folder and re embedding the video.
That should do it!
Also see Creating Video for Powerpoint and inserting video into Microsoft Powerpoint
Despite ripping me for writing a blog my brother who has been given a yacht to use in the Caribbean for 5 months along with James Martin (kite tester for kiteworld magazine, sponsored rider and male model, no big deal!!) has decided to document their trip by writing their own WordPress blog, Wind Waves and Caribbean Raves. To add an extra dimension and make use of the fact that they have been cross referencing anchor spots with windsurfing, surfing and kitesurfing locations. They wanted to include some kind of map.
