Creating internet video (or audio): from the idea to the web.

Brian Teaman, Institute for Foreign Language Research and Education

This workshop will go through the steps of getting video (or just plain audio!) onto the web for creating or making available language learning materials. There are many ways to get your materials to the web. I will go through the steps emphasizing the hardware and software that I use. Not everyone has the same resources available so I will point out as far as I am able other possibilities for doing this. This presentation will familiarize you with the basic issues so that you will be able to at least ask the right questions when it comes to doing it yourself even if you don’t have the same equipment.

Please interrupt at any time to ask questions.

Why video?

Why the web?

Defining the project.

Streaming versus Downloading.

1. An introduction of yourself to your students.
2. A weekly or monthly program for your students.
3. More extensive materials of you teaching
4. Native speaker database (VU-E).
5. Movie clips (disclaimer: check out the legal issues before you do this of course)
6. TV News clips (note legal disclaimer above)
7. Tell me your ideas, let’s talk about it.

You need a fairly modern machine to work smoothly. You can do lots of editing with less than 256 memory, but most people I’ve read seem to feel that 256MB is quite sufficient for most amateur work. A fast and big hard drive is best, but you can get by with a couple of gigabytes. It all depends on what you want to get onto the web.

You need a server. How much memory is available? Here are some ideas of the memory you will need on your server for about 10 seconds of video:

Take a short clip and do the whole process from definition to supplemental materials and get it working on the web. Check with different browsers on different machines at different bandwidths. Keep in mind who your enduser is and what kind of platform they will be working from.

End-user testing should be done as soon as you have enough materials to do a pilot test.

You will probably need to reform the project once you’ve done the testing. Go back to step one and revise. This will likely be an ongoing process, so get used to it. Make some great materials! The web is full of half-baked ideas.

3.1.1 XLR connectors on your camera.

To get the best sound you need to use excellent microphones which require XLR connectors. Most on-camera microphones and/or mini-plug type external microphones are not up to the task. They are generally omnidirectional and usually pick up lots of camera noise. I know of no decent directional microphones with mini plugs. Microphones above the run-of-the-mill level are not usually worth looking at unless they are about 25,000 yen ($200.00USD) and up.

3.1.3 Recommended cameras: SONYTRV-900 (200,000 yen range), SONYVX1000/2000 (250,000 yen range) SONY DSR-PD150 (our camera, has XLR). The PD150 gives you the best audio potential out of the box, however the DVCam format is less used and may not be supported by low end digitizers (even SONY’s own DVGate doesn’t!). Fortunately, it shoots in regular mini-DV too.) I belong to a public University. We buy SONY. There are other great cameras (better according to some) by CANON, Panasonic and others. Do your research, you don’t have to buy SONY and put up with their smug attitude. Note, however that DV formats can differ from maker to maker so there might be compatibility problems with other cameras and decks. Check this out before you buy the wrong player for your camera. You don’t absolutely need a player, the cameras work just fine for most work (we have only a standard VHS deck for downloading stuff to the internet). Any other format should work perfectly OK (Beta, VHS, Digital 8, VHS-8 etc.) because your final project will be much lower quality on the web than any of these formats. We bought Hi-end because we could afford it and wanted archival quality tape for posterity’s sake. We might be able to use these later on the web in a much higher quality format when bandwidth improves.

3.1.4 There are countless microphones out there. I found shopping for a microphone quite time consuming and in the end was limited to what I could easily get from my distributors here. I found Shure hard to get but anything from Audio Technica and SONY rather easy to do. I made lots of calls to the U.S. to really talk about these issues and make a good choice.

1. Analog camera to hard drive. (A/D converter)
2. Clips from a VHS player.
3. There are many programs for capturing, old macintoshes come with Apple Video Player that allows recording from Analog RCA or S video inputs.

Programs which get programs ready for the internet:

Which format?

Your school or location might have purchased Real Server. Check it out. Realserver does not only serve REAL but can do other formats (at least Quicktime). You don’t need realserver. I placed one on my regular unix account and it works fine. It probably won’t stream multiple copies though, or might soon run into problems. Our Realserver plus server has a license for up to 64 simultaneous streams.

FTP program is needed to do the uploading.

On Macintosh I use Fetch! Free version available to academic users. My windows machine has FFFTP in Japanese. I didn’t download or install it, but I can fumble through the Japanese at a minimal level.

One Word: Cleaner. It creates html code along with your document. Lovely!

Go to this link and check out the source HTML for the different formats.

Here are some sample HTML codes for some different formats.

Basic Supplemental materials.

1. Outline of the video.
2. List of questions the video is based on.
3. Advanced organizer type questions.
4. Transcript of the video.
5. Anything else? It’s your turn.

Hot Potatoes

Button interface. See our link at:

SMIL (RealAudio only allows random access "in" points. "Out" point is always the end of the file. Of course the user can use a slider, stop and start but this is not the easy access we want). We are experimenting with SMIL for this.

2 Years later, you’ve placed all your courses on-line. You went to the first day of classes and passed out your syllabus. You are sitting on the beach in Guam, taking a break from your snorkeling: fresh squid sashimi, a cold beer, you log on to your server to check student home work. A 14 year old, barefoot, sun blackened boy comes up to you from the hotel concierge with a telegram from Japan.

From the University, great! You give the boy a dollar. He beams, "thank you sensei". You smile but your mind races to the contents of the envelope in your hand.

I got that research grant or maybe a promotion. "They loved the course materials I put on line, maybe that’s it" you puff.

You open the letter in anticipation, brain swirling with sun and beer. Your mouth smacking with the flavor of sea, soy and a scrawny but bold local wasabi that gets into your sinuses faster than sarin. Two words were all it contained. Two words in perfect English that summed up the dreams of every Japanese university president: "You’re fired."

http://www.realnetworks.com/devzone/downlds/RV8_RA8_encode_settings.pdf?src=010509realhome,rnhmpg_041301,rnhmsi,dlvrit,srvpl_040101,srvupsu_121100,ftrcomp_012501,srvupsu_121100,nosrc