3 Way Video iChat
This is a recording of a 3-way video conversation. It was recorded live in iChat AV on a MacBook using the latest version of SnapZ Pro which now works on Intel Macs. The program lets you record any audio that plays on your Mac (so called Mac Audio) as well as audio from the built-in mic or the audio input. I chose to record both the Mac Audio and the built-in mic. Bob and Dad are on Macs running OS 10.4.7 and the latest iChat AV and we are all on broadband cable connections. I saved the video using Sorenson 3 for video compression and I chose 22 kHz, with no compression for the audio. This original file was about 8 Mb. I uploaded it to Vimeo.com to convert it to a Flash movie and discovered that my voice, which was recorded with the built-in microphone did not play back in the Flash movie. I guess Flash does not support 2 tracks of audio like QuickTime does. So I used QuickTime Pro to export each track as an AIFF file and used Audacity to combine the two into a single mono track. I then used Quicktime Pro to delete the two existing audio tracks in a copy of the original movie and then pasted in the mono track. I saved this version using H.264 video compression at 12 frames per second and Linear PCM 22 kHz mono audio compression. This brought the file size down to 3.9 Mb instead of 8 and when I uploaded it to Vimeo.com, the audio played fine in the Flash movie. The final Flash movie file is 2 Mb and is about 1 minute long. I downloaded the Flash file to my computer and uploaded it to the Blodget.net server on DreamHost.com. I am again using the iFrame tag to embed the Flash player in this blog post.
Update: I also uploaded a QuickTime version so you can see it at the original size (481 x 298 pixels instead of 320 x 240). This file is 4.5 Mb Sorenson 3 video at 15 frames per second, using Linear PCM 22 kHz audio compression.
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