Eyploring

Wiki Drama

2011-04-22T16:17:00.000-07:00

I've been experimenting with GoAnimate as a way to make video animations.

"Biographies of Living People" is the first in a series of videos about Wikipedia and Wikiversity.

GoAnimate uses Flash and like many video "applications" it is a hardware beast: I suggest using the latest version of Flash, a fast processor and plenty of memory. GoAnimate runs on "the cloud" and was off-line for a day recently when the cloud dried up.

After playing around with the free version of GoAnimate for a week, I got an email offer of a one month trial account for GoPlus. The trial GoPlus account allows you to get around their restriction on access to the GoAnimate voice-to-text feature. Also the trial GoPlus account gave me the ability to make a video that was longer than 2 minutes. This one is my longest, so far. In my experience, when a video starts getting to about 2 minutes and it has a large number of elements, then the whole GoAnimate video editing interface can start to slow down. I've had several crashes and once I lost about 20 minutes of video editing when I got a message saying that the save function had failed.

The best thing about the one month trial account for GoPlus is that it allows for converting your GoAnimate videos to Youtube videos. The second best "feature" is the ability to mix together characters from different GoAnimate character sets ("channels"). For example, when starting a video in the Star Trek channel you also get access to some characters from 11 other "channels". The third best thing about the one month trial account for GoPlus is that it allows for image uploads.

Bad Audio

2009-07-22T12:05:00.000-07:00

I noticed that some of my old YouTube videos now have corrupted audio.

New version of Embryos from Earth:

I replaced the audio of the Old version:

An example of a video with corrupted audio:

Xtranormal video

2009-04-08T14:50:00.000-07:00

Wiki technology began as a tool that facilitates collaborative authoring of webpages. We can go beyond text and add images and sounds to our webpages. I just created a short video for some dialog from the story Cellular Civilization. I used the xtranormal website to make the video clip. You can arrange to have your video creations uploaded to YouTube.

The Xtranormal video making system is still being developed, but it is easy to use and fun. There are some problems with their test-to-speech, but it is not too bad for the price (free). Since it is hard to understand some of the spoken words, I used the YouTube feature for adding captions. This is easy to do using a word processor, saving the captions as a text file and using the .sub file format (see the online instructions).

In this scene, Dexamene Gregores and Charles Parker are chatting. Dexamene is on a secret mission and Charlie is baffled by Dex and is trying hard to figure out who Dexamene is and what she us up to.

Related link: fiction wikia media project

YouTube and copyright

2008-01-27T18:52:00.000-08:00

When I go to
http://www.youtube.com/my_account
I get a message saying:

"You have videos that may contain copyrighted material. Please resolve this."

When I follow the link for "resolve this" there is a button that says
"Copyright Info". When I click on that, I get to a page that says:

You have the following options:

1. Do Nothing

Your video will continue to play uninterrupted everywhere.

This seems odd. Am I missing something?

This has to do with a video that I ran through YouTube's system for adding audio to videos. Apparently YouTube is now giving users copyright warnings for having used audio provided by YouTube. Duh.

I tried to send YouTube support an email about this but I could not even find their current email address. Customer service with a smile.....you know they are laughing at you. I still do not understand the YouTube $$$ model, but while trying to send my email yo YouTube while using gmail I saw this ad:

Free Farting Video - AmazingFartVideos.com - 10 Fart Videos That Changed The World. Watch Free Instantly!

Previous related blog post(the origin of the video/audio remix that is now causing trouble) .

Editing Tutorial

2007-08-17T13:20:00.000-07:00

I made a "3D screencast" about how to edit a wiki webpage. This new version replaces the old version that is still available at the Internet Archive. I have been comparing the Internet Archive's Embed Video Format of the new video to the YouTube Embed Video Format.

The YouTube version is not bad. The 640 x 480 pixel OGG video format version at Wikiversity is better.

Test of the Internet Archive embed flash video player:

3D Screencasting

2007-08-12T12:34:00.000-07:00

The 1.7 version of DAZ|Studio came out and I have been learning how the use the new features such as D-Formers. I also made a short tutorial for lighting.

I've started experimenting with ways to insert animated 3D characters into screencasts. The goal is to make screencasts that are used for Wikiversity tutorials more interesting, essentially replacing a simple mouse cursor with an animated human figure.

Embryo Culture

2007-07-28T16:30:00.000-07:00

I replaced the earlier "In the Lab" video with "Embryo Culture". Somehow I had messed up the "In the Lab" video file.

In the Laboratory

2007-07-28T11:48:00.001-07:00

I uploaded to YouTube a new version of the teaser for "The Nanoepitaxy of Susanne Marie". The new version includes a scene in the Laboratory of Archology Base when the new embryos from Earth arrive.

I'm still having trouble with what YouTube does to the uploaded file when there has been some digital processing done prior to upload. I tried to use iMovie to slightly darken the earlier "greeting" scene that was over-exposed. I my have made it worse by adjusting the contrast. Also, in the new scene, my digitally-synthesized voices came out even worse than last time.

DAZ Studio tutorials

2007-07-22T11:03:00.000-07:00

I have started to assemble a group of tutorials for how to create computer-generated animations.

Rendering models of living organisms - using DAZ Studio for rendering and animation of human figures and other similar 3D models.

Props and models for DAZ Studio - how to download and use polygon mesh models with DAZ Studio.

Animation with DAZ Studio - how to make computer-generated animations using DAZ Studio.

A nice DAZ Studio video:

YouTube status blog

2007-07-20T09:36:00.000-07:00

I just found the YouTube status blog. This is a good place to check before reporting bugs.

Funny YouTube help video:

Embryos from Earth

2007-07-19T13:12:00.000-07:00

I extended my "video teaser" for "The Nanoepitaxy of Susanne Marie". The version called "Embryos from Earth" includes some animated characters. YouTube now allows you to select among the three automatically-generated thumbnail images to pick the one that is used for each video.

I'm not happy with the way YouTube processed either the video or the audio for the part of "Embryos from Earth" that includes the animated characters.

Character Animation

2007-07-08T22:19:00.000-07:00

I made a short video using DAZ Studio. This uses the "fairy" model that comes with DAZ Studio. I'm not sure which is sillier, putting wings on the fairy so she can fly or letting her fly by getting on the dragonfly.

Space Flight

2007-07-06T15:07:00.001-07:00

I started experimenting with Bryce and made some computer animation scenes for a trip from Earth to a distant star system. A nice feature of Bryce is that multiple computers on a local network can be used to render an animation.

The worm hole was designed to have a series of 4 rings blast out as the ship entered. I need to go back and look at the motion paths in detail because rather than blast out in single file, the rings crashed into each other and bounced around.

Computer Generated Animation

2007-07-01T11:14:00.000-07:00

I started experimenting with computer-generated animation. The short (50 seconds) video call "Planet Fall" at YouTube is a teaser for the story ""The Nanoepitaxy of Susanne Marie". I found Vue to be fairly easy to use with a good introductory tutorial and a big users manual. In contrast, Xface seems to have limited documentation.

Video Not Available

2007-06-25T18:17:00.000-07:00

video removed for copyright while similar videos were not?
"we are likely either not aware of them or do not have reason to believe they are infringing"

Well, right, but it is all still mysterious. After three weeks of seeing what items from my video blog become "unavailable", it seems like there must be some people who have the job of requesting take downs of videos...but many of these videos are up for months before they are taken down. Does that mean that the people making the take-down requests do not know how to search YouTube or that the search function is so over-loaded that they cannot find videos until they work their way up in the rankings or can it take months to get YouTube to remove a video?

I've also seen some videos where comments are not allowed (but not many). I might be wrong and not remembering exactly what happened, but I had been looking closely at the two Cat Stevens videos that were in my video log. I had noticed that one had comments blocked, then the next day I found that it was removed from YouTube. Why that one? It would sure be interesting to know what goes on "behind the scenes" of YouTube.

Science Fiction Collaborations

2007-06-24T18:39:00.000-07:00

I started a YouTube group as an experimental work group for collaboration on science fiction-related videos (see). I find it frustrating that YouTube has a 500 character limit on "comments", but I guess the logical approach is to have serious text-based work at Wikiversity.

One of the largest YouTube surprises for me has been the "lego video":

Flame

2007-06-23T20:11:00.000-07:00

I previously saw some mild bitching about singers such as at The First Cut Is the Deepest by Sheryl Crow. Today I saw some more serious complaining at Peace Train. It is interesting to see that the "art" of the flame war is alive at YouTube.....sorta shows it is a "real" internet community.

I did not realize that there were "love letter" videos submitted from YouTube users to the YouTube staff. See:

Business Model

2007-06-23T12:58:00.000-07:00

The YouTube business model includes the strategy of providing hosting for video, attracting people who will watch the videos and getting people to click on ads while they are exploring the YouTube website. The goal is to have the community of YouTube website users and marketers make use of YouTube pages in a mutually beneficial way. YouTube has been exploring a range of strategies for getting companies to pay for access to the eyeballs of the YouTube community.

YouTube has Content Partners and says "content creators are recognizing the potential of promoting themselves and their programming on YouTube". Universal Music Group is an example of a company that makes versions of its music videos available for viewing on YouTube. The YouTube "partners" can agree to run ads on the pages with their videos and share in the marketing value of exposing their video content to the YouTube community.

New York Film Academy must have someone who sends friend requests to people with new YouTube accounts. Anyone can set up a YouTube account and start "networking" within the community as a way to let people know about some outside cause, website or company. I do not really understand the different types of YouTube accounts. dhand34 is a "regular" account but seems fairly aggressive about sending out friend requests.

Copyleft video

2007-06-17T13:13:00.000-07:00

I previously updated my Web 2.0 and copyleft video for YouTube, but I was not satisfied with the thumbnail image. Here is a version with a better thumbnail image:

Also, I was reading some blog entries and saw the suggestion that you can get good results on YouTube with Apple's video encoding and every 15th frame a key frame. I tried uploading a video using some of these suggestion and the upload failed. I got no error message, just a generic "web page not found" error message. In any case, I am fairly satisfied with the Sorensen 3 encoding and iMovie's default of a key frame every 24th frame.

TestTube audio tracks

2007-06-17T07:48:00.000-07:00

I started exploring TestTube and found the instructions for the AudioSwap feature. I modified my "Mnemtronium" video to use one of the available audio tracks.

Artist: Anchor Mejans
Song: Mark Surrency (from the Cloud selections)

YouTube needs to add a checkbox that will allow you to get a graceful fade-out of the audio when the selected audio track is too long for the video.

See also: The Cloud by Anchor Mejans & Robert Nunnally

Thumbnail images

2007-06-17T07:31:00.000-07:00

I edited my Mnemtronium video to add about seven seconds to the end. This made the middle frame of the video file a more interesting thumbnail image for the video. Here is the new version of the video:

Copyleft videos

2007-06-16T10:44:00.000-07:00

I previously tested a screencast video that I had made for 640 x 480 resolution. I was not satisfied with the ability of YouTube to show on-screen text that was as small as what I had in that video. Here is a new version of that old video modified for YouTube:

Default 425 x 350 pixels:

320 x 240 pixels:

I hate the fact that there is no control over the thumbnail image used by YouTube!

I wonder if YouTube has any interest in promoting copyleft videos. The Copyright Tips page says, "if you use an audio track of a sound recording owned by a record label without that record label's permission, your video is infringing the copyrights of others, and we will take it down as soon as we become aware of it," which seems to totally ignore the idea that a copyright holder could license their work for re-use by others in the copyleft way.

Groups, Tags and Categories

2007-06-14T16:29:00.000-07:00

After looking at a few tags such as internet and wiki I also tried copyleft and then I hit the link for "Try searching for "copyleft" in: Groups" by mistake. That led me to the copyleft group. Sadly only one member. I had previously taken a quick look at Groups and not seen much of value.

Categories
The YouTube categories do not seem very.....comprehensive?

Autos & Vehicles
Comedy
Entertainment
Film & Animation
Gadgets & Games
Howto & DIY
Music
News & Politics
People & Blogs
Pets & Animals
Sports
Travel & Places

I'm wondering if concepts such as copy left will ever find a role in YouTube. Maybe there could be some kind of competition for copyleft videos.

Trick for tags with spaces: free_culture

NEW (beta) version

2007-06-14T12:48:00.000-07:00

Last night I got a bunch of "feature temporarily not available" messages at YouTube. Today a "Try out the NEW (beta) version of this page!" link is being shown at some YouTube pages. This is one day after I commented on the fact that playslists with more than 10 videos stop playing after 10 videos have played. One of the software changes seems to now allow long playlists to correctly play without stopping after ten videos have played. Another change is that there used to be a link from a playlist to your video log if you previously made that playlist your video log. I no longer see that link, but your video log can still be reached from your main channel page. Update: before the end of the day the video log link was back!

I was expecting to see something about the changes at the Help Center or on the YouTube blog, but there seems to be no information posted. At the blog, I did find out how to remove the "related videos" from embedded videos like this one:

Just add "&rel=0" after the video's URL.

Web 2.0 is not for the rats

2007-06-13T07:06:00.000-07:00

I want to be able to make screencasts with readable text for YouTube. Here is an example of a YouTube video from Mike Wesch that has on-computer-screen text:

As a test, I took an existing screencast that was made in 640 x 480 pixel resolution and reduced it to YouTube's suggested 320 x 240:

This video file is a GFDL-licensed compilation ("aggregate") of original work with other separate and independent works as described at its Wikiversity page.

I think text from screencasts needs to be a little larger, but I decided to see if YouTube has an optimized process. I uploaded a nearly 100 MB 640 x 480 version of the above video:

I think the version derived from the large file is slightly better for small text, but not good enough.

Video upload

2007-06-12T16:03:00.000-07:00

I just uploaded my first video. I tried two different video formats, Apple's .mov and MPEG4. The MPEG4 file was larger (12 vs 3 MB), but I could not see any difference in quality and how they played. While the video upload system was processing the MOV format file initially showed at YouTube as having a zero duration, but it eventually came through with the correct time. I'm left wondering how to control which frame of a video is used as the static image shown for the video. According to this there is no way to select the thumbnail image besides playing with the content/length of the video. The trick is to have a "cool" image as the middle frame of the video.

Video rendered from the MPEG4 file

Help Desk

2007-06-12T10:32:00.000-07:00

After three failures, I finally had some luck associating my YouTube account with this blog. I thought doing so was supposed to make it easier to link from here to YouTube video, but I do not see that anything changed.....of course, the help page does not explain anything.

There is now a Help Desk at the YouTube Wikia. Maybe my first video for YouTube should be a screencast showing how to get to that website.

Embedding video

Video Log 2

2007-06-11T19:24:00.000-07:00

Questions about YouTube:

video not available

Today I finally got the red "video not available" message on one of the items in my video log. It would be interesting to know how many videos are removed from YouTube each day because they violate some copyright. Michael Liedtke recently wrote that 200,000 videos are uploaded every day. If only 10% are copyright violations, that represents a huge amount of work for people to request removal and for YouTube to comply with the requests. Maybe most people who own the copyrights see YouTube as a free advertising service. There certainly are companies like Universal Music Group that have gone out of their way to make their music videos available on YouTube. Do these companies get upset if youtubers make and upload their own versions?

Video Log 2

You make a YouTube playlist and "add some personality to your Playlist", in particular, you give the Playlist a title. Then you say you want the Playlist to be used as your video log. Then your channel is graced with a video log called "Video Log 2". Um, why?

make playlist icon

What does this button do? I've seen that some people have small images next to their playlists in their list of playlists. I cannot get that to happen.

Attach a Video

Got to someone's channel and click "add a comment". Down at the bottom it says "Attach a Video" and there is a drop-down menu that shows your own videos and some of your favorite videos. So far, I have not uploaded and videos, but this does not seem to do anything with favorite videos.

fetching your blog information

As I write this I'm trying to add this blog to my YouTube channel. After YouTube was "fetching your blog information" for over an hour, I got a "110, 'Connection timed out'" message.

Eyploring YouTube

2007-06-11T18:19:00.000-07:00

I'm one week into exploring YouTube and I finally found the help page that explains you can add a blog to your YouTube account. I've also been wanting to try to embed a Youtube video:

I have some questions about using YouTube which I will explore here and at the YouTube Wikia.

Eyploring?
y = f(x) and eyploring is something that comes after exploring. y = youtube and we are exploring what can be done with shared video.

My YouTube channel.