Having the ability to create and post video and audio is extremely useful. If you had been watching my Twitter feed today, you might have seen this post whiz by:
#ASIST2011 #SIGUSE Symposium - Outstanding Contributions to Info Behavior Award goes to Donald Case - watch video: http://bit.ly/nScfz3
I shot that video on the fly today with a Flip video camera (notice the USB plugin - after you shoot the video, you can just plug the camera into your USB port and download the video to your computer), however many people shoot video on their cell phones these days. As the session continued on, I uploaded the video to YouTube, and used YouTube's new editing functions to clip off a few unwanted extra seconds at the end. Thus before the session I filmed in had even concluded, I had the video up on YouTube and was tweeting the video link on Twitter.
Now that is not very fancy. You can do more if you use a video editor, and some PC's and Macs come with one preloaded such as Windows MovieMaker or Mac iMovie (see IPL2 15 Things on Video for more details) One option is instead of using video, you can intersperse pictures and photos with video, or just entirely use photos and no video at all (you might think of documentaries with voiceovers over a historic photo.)
There are even sites where you can upload some photos or pictures and have them turned into a movie. I made an example using Animoto below:
Virtual Reference Animoto (entirely made with still photos rather than video)
I often use Powerpoint to make an image, such as mixing photos and text together in a slide, then taking a snapshot of the slide and using the snapshot as a still photo in a video. (Remember our handy "snapshot" buttons - CTRL ALT PRTSCR for PCs, COMMAND APPLE 3 for Macs) You can also just download free images, video, and audio and mix them in your video editor - see the Creative Commons for free pictures, audio and video.
For a free audio editor, many people use Audacity. You can talk into Audacity and record your audio that way, or record audio with a digital voice recorder and edit it in Audacity. Note there is a special sequence of steps for working with MP3s in Audacity (you only have to do this setup once though, then it will always work for MP3s too.) You can also just record your audio on a web site such as Talkshoe. The IPL 15 Things Podcasting site has more info on working with audio.
In general, a couple sites for exploring video and audio are:
Video: http://ipl2.cci.fsu.edu/community/wiki/index.php/Videos#Hands_on_Activity
Audio: http://ipl2.cci.fsu.edu/community/wiki/index.php/Podcasting#Hands_on_Activity
and Animoto is probably the easiest to experiment with. Enjoy, and see you in class next week on Weds. Oct 19!
