TechMedia

I love how BooneOakley.com used YouTube videos – linked together through annotations – as its website.

It is fun, simple and perfectly gets the message across. The site uses a URL redirect into YouTube and all navigation is done within YouTube. Even the ‘contact’ option uses YouTube mail.

(Thanks Adobe Edge and its Edge of Flash article for tipping me off to this site.)

With the massive increase in online video, I wasn’t surprised to see a story on mediapost.com saying it is the fastest growing medium in the world.

The story cited a new report from social media research consultancy Trendstream and research firm Lightspeed, giving stats such as:

• In one week in January, 97 million Americans viewed a streaming clip online – as many as are tuning into any major broadcast network
• With 72 per cent of U.S. web users watching clips online, web video outstrips both blogging and social networking, and is now the leading “social-media platform”
• With 49 million active Web users – 32 per cent – uploading content in January 2009, users of all ages now generate far more content than traditional broadcasters and collectively contribute the majority of video content to the web

Meanwhile the world’s most popular video-sharing site, YouTube had a 1,700 per cent jump in mobile video uploads over the past six months.

YouTube has shown phenomenal growth over the past few years. In mid-2007, six hours of video were uploaded to YouTube every minute. Now, 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. In fact, as I write this blog “uploaded youtube” is a trending topic on Twitter.

In my hometown of Yellowknife I have seen the growth of online video. Here are a few businesses that prominently feature online video. Let me know what I am missing:

• CBC North – runs its full Northbeat news show as well as numerous shorter news videos
• Kellett Communications – offers full gamut of filmmaking and effects, strives to make communication interactive, weave it in and out of all media, especially online content
• Up Here – this magazine about the north posts photos animated Ken Burn’s style with music/voice over track such as this recent soundslide, which is hosted on Up Here’s Vimeo channel

You can check out the Yellowknife tab on my Netvibes page to see other Yellowknife videos on YouTube.

I recently finished an intensive course in Avid Xpress Pro and found that fellow students mostly had a background with, and preference for, Final Cut Pro. I started off the same way, but by day four I was feeling pretty good in Avid, and wondering if maybe it was the better program.

One difficulty in moving to Avid from FCP is that Avid is a modular system and unless you are in the right mode (segment/trim/effect) you won’t be able to edit.

I watched an interesting video with editor Shane Ross who uses both systems. Below are a few of his main pros/cons.

Avid: best for media management, sub-clipping, and locator control. This would be the best software for “big environments,” where you have to capture full tapes and break them down.

Final Cut Pro: better for high definition and speed. So best choice for a high def project that needs cutting fast – it’s easier to drag clips around in FCP.

Mostly it seems that the two systems are pretty similar except for Avid’s superior media management, and I have to agree with Scott Simmons that its trim tool is intuitive and easy to use.

As Scott points out, the software is just a tool, in the end it’s the editor who is the more important factor.

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?

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.

I have been working on a portfolio site for my URL www.ehargreaves.com, and have now uploaded a home page. I used the menu from my After Effects/DVD project, exported the clip as an FLV file, then imported it into Flash.

Once the FLV file was inside Flash I added invisible buttons over the DVD navigation. These buttons all link to external sites – my YouTube and Flickr streams, and this blog. The “_blank” tag on the button links cause other tabs to open (the intended effect), but this also causes the Flash to become deselected, so then the buttons don’t have their sound/roll over effects again unless the Flash document is clicked on

That means I have to get going on the inside pages. Once I have these pages to link to, I will remove the “_blank” tags because my links will lead to internal sources.

My plan for these inside pages (which I will create in Dreamweaver) are to add:

• a video page, using my YouTube content as embeds
• a photojournalism portfolio in the big-photo style of Boston.com
• a new ‘About’ page, which will link back to this blog

WordPress site upgrades also needed

I will also continue to make changes to this site. A prominent RSS feed button would be nice (the text version gets a bit lost), and eventually a custom theme. I will be picking the brains of other bloggers at two upcoming conferences: WordCamp Whistler and 2009 Northern Voice.

Still mulling Twitter options. I like having the update feature since my tweets are mostly about technology, but if I get too busy to blog for a few days, then Twitter takes over. I would welcome suggestions

Even before the Flash-animated movie Waltz With Bashir took home a Golden Globe for foreign-language film prize, I had been interested in seeing it. After all, it rated an impressive 95 per cent Fresh Pick on rottentomates.com

The New York Times has a thought-provoking video interview with the movie’s writer/director Ari Folman in which he discusses how Waltz With Bashir was animated in Flash using 3,500 keyframes, giving the film its unique, graphic-novel style look.

Preview for Waltz With Bashir

You can check out more details on Folman’s innovative techniques in studiodaily.com’s story.

The team used photographs to build realism into the environments, then added the background details.

Waltz With Bashir was made for two million dollars, and took four years to complete. Animators would slave a whole day over a second and a half of footage. That’s dedication, but it looks like their toils were well worth it.

So this is the Harry Potter newspaper idea Ron was speaking of … is this a practical evolution step for newspapers?