TechMedia

It seemed an obvious choice to go with Vimeo to use its embeds as my video portfolio, after all, you need high quality for portfolio pieces. So forked out the $80 to upgrade to Vimeo Plus (5GB per week limit) as just one of my videos pushed me over the free account limit of 500 MB per week.

Had an issue starting off with sound-video falling out of synch. But generally I was happy with the video quality and mused on Twitter/Facebook, “all good in Vimeo land now and quality is so much better than YouTube.”

This drew the attention of video intake producer for CBC Vancouver Charlie Cho, who replied, “But is Vimeo better than YouTube HQ? Not in this random case:”

You Tube Click HQ button

video vs.

Vimeo

I would say that’s a tough call, but I am giving a slight edge to Vimeo for the crispness of its edges. That is assuming that both these videos were uploaded at the same file size.

YouTube allows files of 1GB in size and 10 minutes long, so it’s a better deal than Vimeo for a free account. Vimeo does not have a maximum file size for uploads, but having a 500MB max per week means the maximum file size is really 500MB. I was unable to find any ‘upgrade to pro’ feature for YouTube, let me know if you hear anything about that feature (or lack thereof).

Still, YouTube is tops in terms of users, and on this side-by-side comparison for video sharing sites.

I will continue to post to both YouTube and Vimeo for now … until the next best thing comes along. What is your preferred site for video?

As my studies at BCIT’s new media program draw to an end this week, I sadly had to say goodbye to the online crew at CBC B.C. I had been working there two days a week since January for my practicum requirement, and here are a few of the projects I got to work on:

Photo galleries

User-generated content is an important component of the site, and maintaining the galleries can be a time-consuming process so I helped in keeping them up to date. The weather and encounters with wild animals galleries had daily submissions from great photographers across the province. I was amazed by some of the submissions, such as the owl that crashed through a window (it was OK!) and the two moose licking salt off cars in a driveway (in Fort St. James).

Also I created a gallery (largely from my own photos) for the Chinese New Year festivities in Vancouver’s China Town.

Another photo gallery project was for me to collect photos from the Illuminate Yale gallery. Regional Web Developer Gloria Leung had great photos from her building, but we needed some different angles, what to do?

We knew there were some great shots on Flickr, but could we use them. Ended up adding some fantastic photographers to my Flickr contact list so that I could message them and ask for their permission to use photos. To my amazement, I had responses back within half an hour, and could create an Illuminate Yaletown gallery.

Google maps speeds development of interactive content

For the Road to the Games interactive map I created an icon set (pictured below).

Creating illustrations 32×32 pixels was a challenge. What was distinctive enough to be distinguishable at that tiny size? And it had to stand out from the map background (Gloria gave some good advice about this – take a screenshot of a Google map to test against).

Found Shadowmaker to be a useful tool in adding the perfect drop shadow. Hurray for automation!

The wonderful part of Google maps (besides it being free!) is the ability to add content to a location – photos, video, text, links. So another part of my map project was to keep it up-to-date. Since it was an Olympic map, the name “GM Place” needed to be changed to “Canada Hockey Place,” for instance. And grabbed new updated photos of David Lam park and Robson Square.

Google has so many tools of use for webmasters, and the practicum has got me thinking about how I might incorporate maps into my websites in the future. (Though I was disappointed to find lakes missing from Yellowknife, NT, my former home. Apparently, it’s too far north for detailed mapping.)

It is a small amount of work to try this out (just print a page), but it will blow your mind. GE’s 3D digital hologram uses your webcam to track a pattern on a page you print to create mini worlds that you can interact with. The effect is striking, I want to investigate this technology more once I am done with schoolwork (in a month).
Here is the YouTube demo, you can even blow on the turbines.