Blodget’s Blog

This is a sample slideshow created in Adobe’s Photoshop Express which is a free photo storage and editing web application. I uploaded about a dozen image files into Express, created an album, and made some display settings and viola, I had a web based slideshow.

I opened the album on my MacBook in Firefox and used SnapZ Pro to capture the movie. I then used QuickTime Pro to trim the movie. I uploaded the H.264 file to blip.tv and embedded their code in this blog post.

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Today I received my Flip Video Ultra camcorder and I was anxious to try it out. I opened the box, took the unit out, put in the two AA batteries, turned it on, pressed the record button, and it WORKED! This thing is sweet. It’s extremely simple to use – drop dead simple. The unit I bought has 1 Gb of memory and will hold up to 60 minutes of video. To download your clips to the computer, just plug it into a USB port. You can either drag and drop the files to your hard drive or use their software which is stored on the camcorder (Mac or Win). The native files are 640×480 AVI files compressed with 3ivx MPEG-4. Audio is 44.1 kHz, mono.

You can import the clips directly from the camcorder into iMovie 6 without having to first copy the files to your hard drive. This saves time. You can then edit in iMovie and Export any way you want, even as DVD. The quality is really quite good considering that this is a $140, Flash based camcorder. It does well in low light too. I wish they had a jack for an external mic and maybe a 3X optical zoom, but all in all I love this little thing. Now, what can I shoot?

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I’m using SnapZ Pro, iChat, and Painter 8 to create a whiteboard demonstration on my MacBook. I can save the movie using the H.264 codec directly in SnapZ Pro. I’m switching back and forth between iChat (for the video) and Painter (for the whiteboard) by clicking on the application icons in the dock. You can see the original file on Blip.tv.

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How to find the hexadecimal numbers of a color using GIMP (the free image editing software). You can see the original file on Blip.tv.

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You can embed a nice show player from Blip.tv. Below is a sample.

I like the quality of the full screen mode. You can see the movie on Blip.tv to see how it differs from the embedded version. The embedded version uses the Quicktime .mov file. The one on Blip.tv uses a Flash file.

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You can embed a nice audio widget from Box.net. Store your audio files (mp3) on box.net (they allow up to 1 Gb) in a folder. They give you the embed code that you can use in your blog or web page. Here’s a sample.

Update: I embedded this code using the embedit WordPress plug-in. Get it here.

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