My first Final Cut Express video project.
After spending three days going through a tutorial to learn Final Cut Express HD, I was ready to create my first video project. I’m sharing it with blog readers so you can see how much effort a person can expend on 25 seconds of video.
About the Project
This particular project features a Gila Monster (pronounced “heela monster”), which is a rather large lizard that can be found in the Arizona desert. If I’m lucky, I see one or two of these in a year, so they’re not exactly common. They are, like so many things in the desert, poisonous, so you don’t want to get too close. But since they’re not exactly fast and they’re definitely not aggressive, you can get photos of them in action if you have equipment with you.
On a backroad trip with Mike and some friends, we happened to come upon one croassing the road. I had my video camera with me and whipped it out to capture some pretty decent footage. This Final Cut Express project cuts out the boring shaky bits, replaces our silly comments with music, and adds opening and closing titles. This is the first in a series of short videos I hope to add to wickenburg-az.com, so make the site more interesting to visitors.
But this is also an experiment to check out video formats and Final Cut Express’s export feature. I had great success when exporting to QuickTime movie format, for iPod, and for Apple TV. But the Windows Media Player export didn’t work right at all and the AVI format was extremely poor quality, despite the file size, so I’m not going to distribute them. I just spent another few minutes using the iPod version of the file to create an e-mail version using QuickTime’s Share command. That worked best of all for the Web view of the file. Only 3.3 MB (which is smaller than the iPod version, and it looks pretty good.
Getting it Online
XHTML purists will tell you that the EMBED tag is a no-no in Web development. I think it has something to do with Internet Explorer which, for some reason, can’t interpret XHTML and CSS like the rest of the Web browsers on this planet.
So this project is also an experiment to see if the QuickTime Embed plugin for WordPress will work. If you’re reading this article shortly after I put it online and there’s no QuickTime movie below (or if the whole site is messed up), it’s because I’m trying this out and debugging. (Check in again in about 30 minutes.)
That said, here’s the movie with a Poster movie. I think I’l leave the iPod file for wickenburg-az.com distribution.
On December 1, 2008 at 7:20 am, 
On November 27, 2008 at 4:22 pm, 
On November 26, 2008 at 10:23 pm, 
On November 26, 2008 at 7:54 am, 
On November 24, 2008 at 3:59 pm, 
On November 20, 2008 at 8:46 am, 
On November 18, 2008 at 3:11 pm, 
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5 responses so far ↓
1 Lee Pearson // May 16, 2007 at 4:36 pm
Leapin’ lizards…er uh Gila Monsters !
Looks good!
2 Miraz Jordan // May 16, 2007 at 5:26 pm
Cool. Around how big would you say it was?
3 Maria Langer // May 16, 2007 at 5:41 pm
This one was about 18-24 inches (45 to 60 cm) long, nose to end of tail.
4 Betsy Cramer // Jun 18, 2007 at 8:22 am
Nice video! - I’ve always wanted to see a Gila Monster in the live, so to speak! I didn’t realize they were so long!
Btw, your links to Barnes and Noble don’t work - the message received is that the affiliate program is no longer in effect. I’d like to learn WordPress, disappointed with the limitations of blogspot, but have heard that WordPress is difficult; perhaps your book will defuse the difficulty? (rhetorical question.)
5 Maria Langer // Jun 18, 2007 at 8:56 am
Thanks for the heads up on the B&N links problem. I’ll check into it today.
WordPress is certainly not as simple as Blogger, etc., but it’s a lot more flexible. Our book does explain all the basics. Check out WordPress.com and give it a try for yourself.
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