My Videoblogging Process

Jan 23, 2006

There are any number of ways and means to create, edit, and distribute your personal video over the Internet. This is how I currently do it.

Video Processing

1. Shoot video (Canon ZR 80 DV camera - $300 at Fry's Las Vegas a year ago. Not great, especially in poor light, but it'll do for now).
2. Attach camera to computer (Dell laptop) via FireWire cable.
3. Because I have Roxio's Easy Media Creator software installed, a window pops up asking if I want to use this to import my video. I do.
4. Edit video in Roxio's VideoWave 7 software (because this is the version I happen to have). I have also used Windows Movie Maker (free with Windows XP; you may have to download SP 2 to get the latest version).
5. Save edited video as DV format AVI (720x576, 25 fps), and sometimes also as WMV at 1.5 mbps bitrate (for television viewing, Veoh, and anything else requiring high quality - the file sizes are large, of course).

Convert:

• to FLV using Sorenson Squeeze for Flash MX Edition
• to SWF, ditto

For both, I set conversion parameters depending on the content of the video, while trying to maintain a "reasonable" overall file size:

• if it contains subtitles, the picture size needs to be larger (which seems not to affect file size much)
• if the video is complex, e.g. a moving subject against a moving background, use a higher video bitrate
• if sound quality is important (e.g., I've added music), set a higher audio bitrate

Note: There's a bug in Squeeze 4.x such that the estimated final file size listed in the "Constrain File Size" box of the Audio/Video Compression settings dialog does not change immediately when you fiddle with the parameters, though the "Total Data Rate" does. If you close the dialog and re-open it, you will see an estimate reflecting your changes. Keep fiddling til you get a file size you can live with.

• to M4V, using QuickTime Pro's "Export Movie to iPod" option
• to DivX (sometimes), using DivX Converter

Posting on My Website

An important step, of course, is to upload all these versions to my website host (Dreamhost - this link is a referral, I get paid if you click here and decide to buy - which gives me plenty of server space and bandwidth, for cheap!).

My site is created and maintained in DreamWeaver, which makes things a little more complicated than using blogging software. But it makes some things, like using Flash video on a page, easier.

I used to simply drag the SWF video file from the Dreamweaver file list into a new page; Dreamweaver automatically did this sort of thing.

Don't ask me what it all means; I don't know and don't need to know. You can see the results here.

This looks nice on the page, but people complained that they couldn't easily stop and start the video, and couldn't "scrub" through it. The videoblogging group then pointed me to an elegant Flash player by Jeroen Wijering, which I've been using in my most recent postings, like this one.

To make this work, I have to:

1. Have one copy of the flvplayer.swf file in the same directory as my vlog pages.
2. In DreamWeaver's code view, paste in this code where I want the video to show up on the page.
3. Edit the code with the name of the current video (in place of "[new filename].flv").

Publicizing My Work

I don't use blog software, but I can use the same tools that bloggers use to manage subscribers, namely RSS.

Because I don't have a blog host making things tidy for me, I had to kind of figure it out, so what you see on my old feed page was cobbled together with the help of FeedBurner. I then give that back to FeedBurner as the source of my FeedBurner feed - the one that I hope everyone will subscribe to because they do a nice job of tracking subscriptions.

More on videoblogging, and some useful links