Blodget’s Blog

Promo for Captain Filmo’s Fantastic Flicks which aired on KVDO-TV, Ch. 3, in Salem, Oregon in 1974.

My first job out of college was at KVDO-TV, a small independent tv station in Salem, Oregon. The station was on the air from 1969 to 1975 and not much of those days survives. This clip is a promo for “Captain Filmo’s Fantastic Flicks” which aired in 1974 for about a month. I playe…d the part of the Captain (and was the manic announcer), my friend Syd Bates was my side kick, and Dave Larson played the “little person” in this promo and was the sane announcer at the end.

This piece was originally recorded on 2 inch quad tape. It was later transferred to 3/4 inch tape and then to VHS tape. I digitized the VHS version on my MacBook through an EyeTV Hybrid and did a bit of clean up in iMovie HD.

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Here’s a classic blooper video. This is the “Funny Weather” where I cracked up on live tv.

I was the weatherman on KVDO-TV in Salem, Oregon for about a year (1974-1975). I had no training and got my information off the AP Weather wire until the station (as a cost saving measure) removed the AP machine. I then got my information by walking out the back door and looking up and West. I also extrapelated from the weather section of the day before’s local newspaper. The funny part was that I think I was more accurate than the Portland stations.

As I recall, we had taped three religious shows that day and I was ready to laugh at anything. Watch for when I say “Hail in Kentucky”. At that point Syd, our cameraman gave me a “Sieg Heil” from behind the camera. Things went down hill from there.

The newsman with me was Lee jackson who later went to work for the 700 Club.

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I’m insert code to play the movie from my DreamHost site insead of Blip.tv.

I just used ftp to upload the QT movie to a folder on my website (on DreamHost). I then used the DreamHost control panel to convert the file. You just type in the folder and file name, set size and quality settings, and click the convert button. The conversion to flv is quick (only a couple of minutes). Along with the flv file (it uses H.264) they also put an html file and a poster jpg file in the folder with the original mov file. You can open the html file in a web editor like Dreamweaver to modify it which I did to add the text on the page.

I like the simple, clean player. Notice that it includes a button in the controller to show the movie full screen. It’s the black square on the right just to the left of the volume control icon. I also like that when the movie finishes playing, the player shows the poster frame again.

The quality of the Flash file is pretty good – much better than their old service. It looks to me to be similar to Blip.tv.

The DreamHost control panel also gives you the option to batch convert a bunch of movies in the same folder. I haven’t tried this yet.

By the way the original QT movie file was 33 Mb and the converted FLV file is 3 Mb.

DreamHost also offers quicktime streaming so you could offer QT versions if you wanted to for iPod or podcasting use.

The best thing about using DreamHost is the control and modification capabilities. You control access to the movies because they are on your own web site. You could password protect your movies folder for instance. Also the player is customizable and is controllable through javascript. For instance, you could tell the player to start at frame number 12345. And you don’t have to use their QT to Flash conversion method. You could use a better tool like the Flash Movie Conversion tool and upload your FLV file to DreamHost.

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This is just a little test movie to see if I can get my old Sony camcorder (which can record in 16:9) to work with iMovie HD. The trick to importing the movie was to set iMovie\’s preferences to NOT automatically letterbox. I compressed this in two steps – first to 1280×70 16:9 and then I compressed that version again to 640×360. This got it down from 272 Mb to 33 Mb.

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The week before Christmas a big snow storm came through and gave us a foot of snow – the most in 30 years. Kris thought it would be fun to try out the cross-country skis.

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Here’s a little test to see if I can email a video to my blog through
Flickr. I’m attaching a short video file to the email. It’s a
Quicktime movie compressed with the H.264 codec. File size is about
500 K.

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VCASMO.com is a free web service that provides storage and display of presentations. The unique thing about this one is that you can display video and slides side-by-side and the slides can be timed to change with the video. Most people are using this for lectures with Powerpoint slides, but as this sample shows, it can also be used for tutorials. Besides embedding the presentation on your own site (like I did above), you can link to it on their website.

I like that you can have hot-links in the slides. I also like that the player can display thumbnails of the slides and that you can navigate to a slide by clicking the thumbnail. This gives you chapter stops. (Click the little black arrow on the right of the slide window to see the thumbnails).

The full screen playback look good and they nicely provide you with embeddable versions – a small one for you blog (like the one above) and a bigger one for full page display.

The editing is very straightforward. The video is displayed above thumbnails of the slides and arrows point from each slide to a time line. You just click and drag the arrows to position each slide. You can play back the video to check your timing and position each slide based on the audio.

You can also present other file types including audio, images, and PDF files. Presentations can also have subtitles in different languages and visitors can add subtitles.

Another cool feature they have is called “Instant VCASMO”. This lets you pair slideshow.net presentations with Youtube videos.

Altogether it’s a great feature set. The website, however, still feels like it’s in beta. Site navigation is funky. It’s hard to get back to your own dashboard. Also, there is no Help. But, hey, try it out!

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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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