The Accordian Guy
The Accordion Guy at BloggerCon II
This video was made with my Canon S400 Digital Camera. I'm posting it up here to show that you don't need an expensive video camera to put video up on the web.
Andrew Grumet asked that I explain how I put video up here.
Ok, here's how I did it.
Yesterday, while on a lunch break at BloggerCon II, The Accordion Guy started playing and singing outside of Pound Hall at Harvard.
Wow!
A perfect opportunity to shoot some video. I took out my Canon S400 and set it to video mode and shot 13 seconds of sound and video.
When I got back to my editing suite later that night, I was anxious to post the video.
I hooked up the camera to my Macintosh via a USB cable and copied the video file to my local disk.
At this point I had two options:
1. I could FTP the video up to my web host or
2. I could load the video into Final Cut Pro for some editing first
The file you get from the Canon S400 is a .avi file.
There's an example of this type of file in an earlier post called Delray Beach Balloon Kites.
In that example, when you click on the file it loads on to your computer and plays.
Pretty simple.
In this example, I wanted to edit the video before putting it on my web host. That's because when I shot it, the better angle on The Accordion Guy was VERTICAL and not HORIZONTAL. The resulting .avi video would have displayed sideways when played.
So I imported the .avi into Final Cut Pro. Once there, I rotated the image and added some text at the top and bottom.
Next, I exported the video as a QuickTime .mov file.
This resulted in a 1.7 MB file.
So before uploading the file, I ran it through Sorenson Squeeze, which reduced the file size to 516 KB.
Next up I grabbed an HTML template that I use for displaying QuickTime video from a web page, made a few edits and then saved that HTML file along with my QuickTime .mov file up on my web host.
Note: There are few different ways of displaying the QuickTime movie to web users. You can just have it open up in the user's QuickTime Player or you can embed it on a web page. Here are a few tips. I like putting it on a page of it's own.
Finally, I played the movie, took a snapshot of the best freeze frame, made a .jpg out of it and posted that along with a link to the movie right up at the top of this post.
Comments