Video

 

The third artefact that I created was the above short video introduction to the Japanese 1A course. I found this artefact more difficult to create successfully than the PowerPoint presentation with narration and the audio podcast for the reasons that I will explain below.

I had initially planned to record the video by myself on Friday 25th April using a video camera from Dr. Ken Newman and a tripod from the technicians in Park Building. However, I was unable to find a position for the video camera in the lecture room, and a zoom position on the video camera, that would allow both the PowerPoint slides and myself to be clearly recorded.

I thus asked one of the Japanese 1A students to record the video for me on Monday 28th April 2008. The student was able to include both the PowerPoint slides and myself in the videos however some of the slides are difficult to read. The student told me that he thought it was possibIe to add PowerPoint slides to video clips. I thus searched online for more information about this and found out that PowerPoint slides saved as jpg files can be added.

I thus took a screenshot of each slide in the PowerPoint file using the “Prnt Scrn “button and saved each screenshot as a jpg file. I then used the video editing software “Avid Media Composer” to insert a screenshot of each slide in the video.

(www.avid.com)

This software is installed on some of the university computers in Mercantile. I have varied the length that the individual slides are displayed on the screen depending on the amount of information contained in each slide. The first four slides thus appear on the screen for between five and ten seconds when I start talking about them. There is a lot of new information on the fifth and sixth slides so I have cropped these slides and kept them on the screen the whole time that I am talking about them. Inserting screenshots of the PowerPoint slides in the video using Avid Media Composer enabled me to overcome the problem of not being able to see the slides in the recorded video. 

The resultant video file was however very large so the technicians in Mercantile Building used the video encoding software “Sorenson Squeeze 4.5” to compress the file size.

(http://www.sorensonmedia.com/pages/?pageID=2)

The file is now only 23 MB which is smaller than the audio file that I used for the audio podcast.

Overall, I feel that I have been reasonably successful in creating my first video. I do not think it looks as professional as the PowerPoint presentation with narration and the audio podcast. I am happy to use the PowerPoint presentation or the audio podcast from September with the students however I am not certain that I will use the video. I have learnt a lot about creating and editing videos during this semester. However, I feel that I need further practice before I will be able to create a video that I would be happy to use with the students.