Chapter 1: This Is Your Brain on Vlogs
3. Post the video to an RSS-enabled blog on the Internet
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Chapter 1: This Is Your Brain on Vlogs
Videoblog creation and editing
First, you shoot your video. You can do this with any camera, as long as you can somehow get the video from the camera onto your computer’s hard drive. Shoot any subject you like — as long as it’s legal — and get permission if you’re going to interview someone and then post it to the Internet.
When you edit the video, you use video-editing software to take the footage from your camera and to cut the video scenes until each segment (called a clip) is short enough to tell the story without dragging too much. You put these clips in order with your video-editing software, usually by using some kind of timeline view. You can also add still photographs at this point. You might add titles and transitions between clips to make them flow more smoothly, or you could leave the video in more of a raw state.
Chapter 10 has more information on editing your video.
Videoblog files and compatibility
When you have finished creating your vlog entry, editing it, and adding the transitions and music, the next step is to compress the file into a format for the Internet. If you’re using a Windows machine, you’ll most likely publish a Windows Media file. If you’re on a Mac, it’ll be some type of QuickTime or MPEG-4 file.
Although Windows Media Player was available for the Mac until 2006, Microsoft recently discontinued support for it on the Mac. QuickTime is still available for both Windows and Mac, as are Flash and Real Media. When new features become available in your preferred file format, get a friend to test them out using another platform (Windows if you’re on a Mac, or vice versa).
The common file formats that are viewable on Mac, Windows, andLinux are MPEG-4 and AVI — which isn’t recommended for videoblogs because it’s usually an uncompressed video format.
In Chapter 12, you get a closer look at file types and compression.
Chapter 2
I Vant to Vatch Your Vlog
In This Chapter
䊳Using video file players for different file formats 䊳Watching syndicated vlogs in RSS viewers 䊳Going mobile with your vlog watching
Videoblogs don’t just show up on your computer, though it would be really cool if they did. You have to find videoblogs and download the vlog entries before you can watch them. Chapter 1 shows where you can hunt up some videoblogs to watch; this chapter talks about how to download and watch ’em.
Most computers made in the last five years can play a movie. In Windows, you have the Windows Media Player. Macintosh has QuickTime. Both programs have players for the other platforms available, so you can watch Windows Media Player movies on a Mac and QuickTime movies on a PC.
However, since videoblogging came about after the most recent generation of multimedia computers made it to market, new tools have been developed that are specifically geared to watching videoblogs. Take, for example, syndicated video content — and the new iPod that can play video as well as music. But even before Apple launched its latest moneymaker, great strides had been made in developing viewer software for all kinds of online video content.
As videoblogging matures, watch for more options to come out. It won’t be long before every blogging Web site or program offers some kind of media-blogging option, and every new Internet connection comes bundled with software to subscribe to and watch videoblogs. Life in the future — gotta love it.
Video File Players
At their most basic, videoblogs are collections of video files, posted to the Internet using a method that makes it easy to update content (such as a blog) quickly. Therefore the most basic tools you’ll need for watching videoblogs are the software programs that let you play those video files.
Not all video files are the same — video files come in a variety of file formats.
(See Chapter 12 for more about video-file formats.) Just as there are some files you can’t open with your Web browser, video players can only open and play files of a certain file format. Currently, that’s true of most video file formats — they’re proprietary in one way or another and are therefore locked into their own players.
The main reason that video-file formats are all different has to do with com- pression. When you post a video to the Internet, you have to compress it, or the file will be too big for anyone to download and watch. The tradeoff that gets you a smaller file size is a reduction in image quality, but more advanced compression schemes retain as much quality as possible while still getting the file size down to something manageable. With current compression rates, you can get a two-minute video down to 5MB of space, with only a small loss of quality. Without compression, the same movie takes up 440MB! Sure, it’s DVD-quality video that you can play full-screen, but very few people will wait five hours to download a two-minute video of your life (or mine, for that matter).
The Big Three of video-file formats are for Windows Media Player (.wmv and .wmf), QuickTime (.movand .mp4), and Flash (.swf). You’ll notice that Windows Media Player and QuickTime have more than one file extension (the .whateverat the end of a file name). Most of those file extensions represent different ways to compress a standard movie so it’ll download faster.
There is one other factor in the maze of file formats and wondering whether you can play a video on your computer. Although the file format helps deter- mine what player to use, there’s also something called a codecthat creates the actual compression for the video. Codecs can be very complicated: if a player doesn’t support a particular codec, it can’t play the video, even if the file format matches. This is why you might open a QuickTime video and not hear any sound, or launch a Windows Media File, only to get an error mes- sage. Codecs are explained in more detail in Chapter 12.
At this point, you might be wondering when I’m going to talk about your favorite streaming video technologies. Well, check out Chapter 12 for
openers; there I talk about videoblogging as it relates to streaming and file- sharing technologies — but you should be aware that it’s not typical to stream a videoblog. One of the things people like about videoblogs is that they can download them overnight, and then get a look at what video(s) they’ve download in the morning. With streaming, you have to be connected to your server at the same time you’re watching the content; it’s all present tense. If there are any connection hiccups in the way, you won’t get to see the whole movie. On the other hand, streaming videos are good for downloading long videos because they let users skip to the end without downloading the whole movie. Streaming is also essential for live video broadcasts.
QuickTime and MPEG-4
QuickTime is Apple’s video viewing program. The QuickTime basic viewer, shown in Figure 2-1, is free and available on both Windows and Mac platforms.
The QuickTime Pro version, which lets you do all kinds of fun stuff (such as edit other people’s videos) is available as a $29 upgrade.
Figure 2-1:
QuickTime has limitations on the free version.
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