Tag Archives: video

Making Movies: A Guide for Serious Amateurs

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A step-by-step approach to making quality video productions.

Making Movies book cover

Tired of turning video footage into ho-hum productions that make people yawn? Or, worse yet, just putting raw video out there and hoping for the best? If so, this guide is for you. It clearly explains how to research, plan, shoot, assemble, edit, and fine-tune video productions for just about any purpose. Richly illustrated with stills from an example movie, it’ll get you on the right track to making movies that’ll inform, entertain, and impress your audience.

Buy from Amazon’s Kindle Bookstore
Buy from MagCloud

I’m really pleased to announce that the first book in the Maria’s Guides series — Making Movies: A Guide for Serious Amateurs — is now out and available in four formats from three sources.

About the Book

I originally wrote the first draft of Making Movies as a personal guide to help me remember how I created my first “watchable” movie, Cherries: From Tree to Truck. Later, I rounded it out into a series of articles for InformIT. To create this book, I added and revised content and formatted it for print and ebook publication.

This book differs from most of my computer how-to books in that it concentrates on theory rather than specific how-to tasks. For example, it doesn’t explain how to edit moves in iMovie or Final Cut Pro. Instead, it tells you about the kinds of clips you should acquire and why. It also goes into a great deal of detail about the part of movie-making that’s most overlooked by inexperienced movie-makers: the planning process. The idea was to write a book that could benefit all first-time movie makers — not just the ones using a specific camera or editing software package.

Inside, you’ll find chapters for the following “steps”:

Introduction
Step 1: Explore the Topic
Step 2: Plan the Shoot
Step 3: Shoot the Video
Step 4: Create the Rough Cut
Step 5: Fine-Tune and Complete
Step 6: Publish and Share
Conclusion

The printed version of the book runs 64 pages, including cover, front matter, and index.

The book uses two examples throughout the text: the existing cherry harvest video I created and a hypothetical home movie of a kid’s soccer game. There are screen images and other figures to help illustrate important points.

I think the book is a great guide to help new movie makers learn the lingo and get a feel for making good movies. Its step-by-step approach can help keep readers focused on the tasks that need to be done to ensure success.

Buy the Book

The book is available in four formats from three sources (so far):

EPUB and Kindle Ebook

I wrote the book primarily for distribution as an ebook. As such, it’s available in EPUB and Kindle formats from two popular sources at a very reasonable $3.99:

Print and PDF Ebook

The book is also available in print and in a PDF-style ebook format from MagCloud.

MagCloud is a print-on-demand publisher that calculates printed cost by the page, so the longer a book is, the more it costs. The printed version, which is in full color, is available for $12.95 plus shipping. Be advised that it may take up to two weeks for the book to arrive.

MagCloud also offers a ebook version of the book. Unlike the EPUB and Kindle versions, the MagCloud version is based on a PDF, so it’s formatted exactly like the book. The cost of this ebook version is $3.95 and it downloads immediately upon purchase.

Note that when you buy the print version, you get a free copy of the ebook version.

Additional Material, Feedback, and Support

You can find additional material about making movies on this site. Just follow the Movie Making topic link.

You can also post questions and read questions and answers on the book’s support page.

Video Blogging with Viddler and WordPress, Part IV

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Displaying a list of your recent Viddler videos in your WordPress blog.

If you start using Viddler regularly — either to create video blog entries as discussed in the previous article of this series or to simply get video content online — you might want to make those videos accessible from within your WordPress blog. Fortunately, there’s a WordPress plugin that makes this very easy: viddlerRSS.

The ViddlerRSS plugin works like most other WordPress plugins. Drop it in your plugins folder and activate it. (You can learn more about how to do that in our WordPress book, so don’t expect to find details here.) Then open your WordPress dashboard and choose Options > viddlerRSS. Enter your Username in the appropriate box, select the number of videos to display and, if desired, enter the HTML code you want before and after each video thumbnail. Then click Update viddlerRSS.

viddlerRSS Options

Now roll up your sleeves and open the template file where you want to insert the Viddler video thumbnails. (Need help modifying theme files? You can learn about that to do that in our WordPress book, too.) In most cases, this will be your sidebar.php template. Insert the following code into the file where you want the thumbnails to appear: <?php get_viddlerrss(); ?>

Or you can get fancy like I did and put some intelligence into it, in case you ever need to disable the viddlerRSS plugin. Here’s the code I use, which includes a heading and other formatting settings:

<?php if (function_exists('get_viddlerrss')) { ?>
<li>
<h2>My Latest Viddler Videos</h2>
<?php get_viddlerrss(); ?>
</li>
<?php } ?>

Save the changes to your template file.

My Viddler VideosNow check your blog to see the results of your efforts. As shown here, I’ve got viddlerRSS set up to display thumbnails for my most recent three videos in my blog’s sidebar. Pointing to a video’s thumbnail displays the title of the video, which can help people decide whether they want to view it. Clicking a thumbnail image opens the video on the Viddler site.

Easy enough, right?

The next (and last) article in this series will explain how you can include a video commenting feature in your WordPress blog. Stay tuned!

Video Blogging with Viddler and WordPress, Part III

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Recording and posting a video.

If you have a camera — like a built-in iSight, WebCam, or DV camera connected via a cable — you can record video using tools on the Viddler site. This is probably the fastest and easiest way to get a video blog entry recorded and online.

Recording a Video

Here are the steps to record a video:

  1. Log into your Viddler account at http://www.viddler.com/.
  2. Click the Record button in the green navigation bar (or elsewhere, wherever you see it).
  3. Recording VideoThe Record from WebCam screen appears with an Adobe Flash Player Settings dialog atop it. Click the Allow button so Flash can access your audio and video input devices.
  4. Recording VideoIn the Select Quality dialog, choose an option suited to your connection speed. I usually choose Medium because I have a relatively slow (512 Kbps) Internet connection. Then click Okay.The screen should show an image of whatever your connected camera is looking at. In my case, I’m using a built-in iSight Camera on my 24-inch iMac, so it’s looking at me:
    Recording Video
  5. Check the Audio, Video, and Quality settings. In the illustration above, it’s using my externally connected iSight for audio, which is wrong. I want it to use the Built-in Microphone, so I select it from the pop-up menu. My built-in iSight camera is identified as a USB Video Class Video — it works, so I won’t argue. I believe the external iSight connected to my computer does not appear in the menu because it’s being used by other software (Evocam, which produces my WebCam).
  6. When you’re ready to record, click the red Record button. The status bar animates with a diagonal red stripe as you record. When you’re finished, click the Red button again.
  7. Wait while Viddler saves your video. It’ll display a status arrow thingie as it works. When it’s finished, it shows the poster frame of the video. If you wait long enough, it’ll play back to you:
    Recording Video
  8. If you like what you see, click the Save button. If you don’t, hit that red Record button again to discard the video and record a new one.

Please remember that I simply cannot provide details about every single camera that you might be using with your computer and I can’t offer troubleshooting assistance if you can’t get this to work. If you have problems, consult Viddler’s online support options. Although you can post a question in this post’s Comments, be aware that I won’t reply if I don’t have an answer. Someone else, however, may have the information you seek.

Setting Video Options

When you save a video, it appears in a Recorded video window:

Recording Video

There are a few things you should set for it:

  • Click the Edit link beside the name of the video (“Recorded video”) and enter a more appropriate name for the video. Don’t forget to click the Save link beneath the new name to save it.
  • If desired, enter tags in the Tags field on the right side of the video. You’ll need to enter each tag separately and click the Add Tag button after each one. (I’m not big on tagging, so I don’t usually do this.)
  • Under Sharing Options, choose Everyone. After all, if you’re going to put this on your blog, you want everyone to be able to see it, right? If a Save Changes button appears there, be sure to click it.

Posting the Video on Your Blog

This is where the setup covered in Part II of this series pays off.

  1. Click the Blog This button under the video.
  2. In the list of blogs that appears beneath the video, click the link for the blog you want to add it to.
  3. Fill in the blog post form that appears:
    Recording Video
    The title will be the title of the blog post. The Post is the text that will appear in the post with the video. (I got fancy with some HTML to link to the first blog post in this series.) You can select a radio button at the bottom of the form to determine whether the video should appear above or below the post text. (I usually choose below.)
  4. Click the Send button. A message should confirm that the video has been successfully posted to your blog. Here’s what mine looks like:
    Recording Video

Now wasn’t that easy?

I should note here that you can use the Blog This button under any public video you see on the Viddler site. So if another Viddler user creates a cool video you want to share with your blog’s readers, you can add it to your blog, along with some comments, as discussed here.

Next up: Displaying an archive of your recent Viddler videos in your WordPress blog.

Video Blogging with Viddler and WordPress, Part II

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Setting blog options on Viddler.

Once you’ve set up your Viddler account, you’re ready to set a few options that’ll make blogging from it easy.

  1. Log into your Viddler account at http://www.viddler.com/.
  2. Click the Options button near the top of the page, under the “Hello, yourname” greeting.
  3. In the Account Options screen, click the Blog Settings link. You should see something like this, although there won’t be any blogs listed for you.
    Blog Settings
  4. Click the + Add Blog button to display configuration fields.
  5. Enter your blog’s name in the Blog Name box and select the type of blog from the Blog Type drop-down list. The entry area expands to offer options applicable to your type of blog. Here’s what it looks like for a WordPress blog:
    Viddler WordPress Settings
  6. Fill in the rest of the fields. The Blog API Endpoint is the URL to your blog’s Home page followed by /xmlrpc.php. You should know the Username and Password.
  7. To prevent having to enter your password every time you send a Viddler video to your blog, turn on the Remember Password button.
  8. Click Submit.
  9. Viddler checks the information you entered. If it is correct and provides access to your blog, a green “Success!” message appears. Click the Awesome button. The blog is added to a list under Your Blogs.

You can repeat this process for as many blogs as you have access to. And, as you may have noticed, Viddler supports many different blog types, including TypePad, Blogger, Movable Type, Manilla, and Vox. So even if you’re not a WordPress user, you can use this feature. And yes, it does work with WordPress.com based blogs — not just the server install blogs.

What does this do for you? It sets up your account so that whenever you see a Viddler video that you want to embed in your blog, your account information is already provided and you’re good to go.

Next up: Recording a video on Viddler.

Video Blogging with Viddler and WordPress, Part I

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What’s this all about?

One of the things I’ve been following from arm’s length is the audio and video blogging phenomena. I’m talking about sites like Utterz, Seesmic, and Viddler.

I’ve tried all three and until I tried Viddler, I couldn’t get excited about any of them. But Viddler has a few features that make video blogging easy and fun — primarily because it works so well with WordPress.

In this series of articles, I’ll explain how you can use Viddler to create video content with any compatible camera attached to your computer and get that content on your blog. And, if you’re a WordPress user, I’ll tell you about two Viddler plugins you can use to make it easy for your blog readers to find your video content on Viddler — even if you didn’t post it on your blog — and even leave video comments for you.

What is Viddler?

Viddler is an online service that enables you to upload or record videos that can then be shared with others. It’s a bit like YouTube, only classier and used by people who want to communicate rather than show off entertainment-based content.

At least that’s my take on it.

Viddler uses Flash to capture video from a camera attached to your computer. It works great with my iMac’s built-in iSight camera and microphone, as well as the iMage camera I bought for traveling with my old PowerBook.

But you don’t have to capture video directly to Viddler. You can take an existing video file and upload it. Viddler supports .mov, .mpg, .wmv, .avi, and .m4v formats. You can’t, however, upload television shows or other material that’s likely to be copyrighted. Viddler doesn’t have the same deep pockets as YouTube and probably doesn’t want to be sued. Besides, you shouldn’t be sharing that stuff anyway.

Once content is on Viddler’s server, it can be set as private, public, or available to just your friends. (Like most social networking sites, you can create a network of friends to share videos you don’t want the general public to see.) You can also share your videos with others on other social networking sites or by embedding them in your blog or e-mail messages.

Getting Started

Viddler Sign UpOf course, to use Viddler, you need an account. Go to http://www.viddler.com/ and click the big green Sign Me Up button. Then follow the prompts to create a user ID and password. You’ll have to provide a real e-mail address, since Viddler will be sending you a confirmation e-mail. Once you get that e-mail, click the link in it to finish setting up your account.

You can now create or upload videos. I’ll discuss both of those tasks in future installments of this series.

Meanwhile, if you have a Viddler account, why not take a moment to share the info about it with us? Use the Comments link or form for this post to provide your Viddler username so we can check out some of your videos.

Steve Jobs/Bill Gates D5 Interview

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Great to watch.

Jobs/GatesI know it’s been out for a while, but I’ve finally taken the time to download the 997MB video podcast file for the Steve Jobs/Bill Gates interview at the D5 conference. (It takes time when you only have a 512kbps connection; don’t even try it on dialup.)

It’s a great look at the history of the two companies — Apple and Microsoft — from the viewpoints of the people that built them. The intro, which features early clips of the two men together, is a real treat. It’s hard to remember that both men were so young when they started on their paths.

A while back, I wrote a post about the Bill Gates Daily Show interview. In that interview, Gates came off as a real geek. Not so in this interview. He’s extremely articulate, amusing, and informative.

And, of course, Steve Jobs is Steve Jobs.

I highly recommend this interview if you have any interest in histories of Apple and Microsoft and their relationship.

Gila Monster

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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.

How to Create a Slide Show for iDVD with iPhoto

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The details.

Greetings, visitors! I noticed that this rather old post has been getting a lot of hits lately. Sadly, it’s not up-to-date with the current version of iPhoto. I’m pretty sure it’s based on iPhoto ’06. I’m looking into how I can do this with iLife ’09; when I get new instructions written, I’ll post a link to them here. Until then, just be aware that these instructions probably won’t work for the current version of iPhoto.

Last week, I wrote a brief article about how I was creating slide shows for an iDVD project. After struggling too long with an iMovie bug that manifests itself with the Ken Burns effect applied to high resolution photos, I turned to iPhoto. My article didn’t go into details about it, but I asked readers to let me know if they wanted more information. Lauren commented that she did. So here’s a bit more detail.

The Goal

I wanted to create a DVD that included still images we’d taken during several trips to points of interest in the Southwest. The DVD would be displayed at a trade show, so it needed to look good.

I like the Ken Burns effect that’s part of various Apple software programs. This effect, named for filmmaker Ken Burns, combines movement with zooming to add motion to still images. Mr. Burns uses this technique extensively in his historical documentaries to make old, still images more visually appealing and interesting to viewers. It, in effect, makes motion possible in images created before motion picture technology was available.

At least three Apple software programs utilize this effect: the System Preferences Screen Saver, iPhoto, and iDVD. I’m sure others do, too. If you know what they are, please don’t hesitate to list them in the Comments for this post.

The idea was to build a slide show using the effect, add music and titles, and include the resulting “movie” on my DVD.

iMovie Fails Miserably

I’d been using iMovie to build a slideshow using this effect, but the high-resolution photo bug was preventing me from getting the job done. This bug, which is under discussion on the Apple Support forums, blanks out an image when you attempt to apply the Ken Burns effect to it. This makes it impossible to manually apply the effect. Extremely frustrating.

I hope Apple does something to fix the bug soon.

iPhoto to the Rescue!

The solution I came up with was to create the slideshow movie in iPhoto and bring it into iMovie as a clip for a longer movie. I could also add chapter markers and title pages and all sorts of cool iMovie things to the project before pulling it into iDVD for menu stuff and burning.

Here’s one way to create a slide show movie in iPhoto. (Of course, there are other ways. This is the way I did it.)

  1. Open iPhoto.
  2. Create a new album and give it the name you want to use for your slideshow.
  3. Drag photos that you want to include in the slide show from any other album or the Library into the new album.
  4. Open the album you created.
  5. Drag the photos around to put them in the order in which you want them to appear.

    Rearrange the photos

  6. With the album’s contents displayed and no single image selected, click the Slide Show button at the bottom of the window. A new Slideshow album is created and displayed.

    A New slide show

  7. Click the Settings button to display default settings for all the slides in the slide show.

    Default settings

  8. Choose a desired transition from the Transition pop-up menu.
  9. Toggle the check boxes so only the following ones are turned on:
    • Scale photos to fill screen
    • Automatic Ken Burns Effect
  10. Select the Fit slideshow to music radio button.
  11. Choose a format from the Slideshow Format pop-up menu. Don’t leave it set to Current Display; pick the option that corresponds to the format of your iMovie project.
  12. Click OK.
  13. Back in the slideshow album’s window, click the Music button.
  14. In the dialog sheet that appears, make sure the Play music during slideshow check box is turned on. Then use the dialog to locate and select the song you want to play during the slideshow and click OK.

    Choose music

You’re now ready to preview the slide show. Click the Play button, sit back, and watch the entire show.

Fine-Tuning the Presentation

While you watch the show, you may want to make notes about the order of the slides, the amount of time each slide appears (the longer the music, the move time per slide; the more slides, the shorter the time per slide), and the way the Ken Burns effect works on your images — particularly the vertical orientation (portrait) images. You can fine tune each image if you like by setting slide options. (This is where iMovie failed me, but iPhoto doesn’t seem to have the same bug.)

To change the order in which slides appear, drag them into a different order at the top of the slide show album’s window.

The following changes override the default settings for the slide show for a specific slide.

To set basic options for a specific slide:

  1. Select the slide you want to change.
  2. Choose options from the Effect or Transition pop-up menu.

To set Ken Burns Effect options for a specific slide:

  1. Select the slide you want to change.
  2. Turn on the Ken Burns Effect check box.
  3. If necessary, drag the slider to the Start position.
  4. Drag the zoom slider to the desired start magnification.
  5. In the image window, drag the image to the desired start view.

    Ken Burns Start

  6. Drag the slider to the End position.
  7. Drag the zoom slider to the desired end magnification.
  8. In the image window, drag the image to the desired end view.

    Ken Burns End

The effect will move and zoom the image smoothly from the start to end settings.

Saving the Slide Show as an iDVD-Ready Movie

This is the painfully simple part of the job. Just choose Share > Send to iDVD.

iPhoto will create a slide show movie in QuickTime format and save it to your hard disk in the Movie folder. This may take some time — enough for a coffee or bathroom break.

When iPhoto is finished, it launches iDVD and places the movie in whatever Project was last used. You can use it there if you like or do what I did: delete it from the project, close the project without saving it, and quit iDVD. Then open your iMovie project and drag the icon for the movie into it. You can then add titles and chapter markers and other iMovie things to fancy it up.

Conclusion

What I like most about this technique is the quality of the movie. It’s pretty darn good — certainly good enough for DVD use on a regular television. And I don’t know if I’m imagining things, but it seems to be better than the slide shows I’ve created with iMovie.

Best of all, if you like the show with the default settings, it only takes minutes to create. In fact, your Mac is likely to take more time saving the slide show as a movie than you took to put it together.

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Creating a Slide Show for iDVD

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A shortcut with good results.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been banging away at an iDVD project. The goal is to show still images from my helicopter tours and excursions as slide shows with music. I’m rather picky about these things and decided that I wanted to use the Ken Burns effect with a dissolve transition to add motion to my slide shows. That means I can’t simply use the Slide Show feature in iDVD.

Let me take a moment to discuss the scope of this project. Back in October, I took the Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventure with professional photographer Richard Noll. Richard took just under 1000 still images and several hours of video. I took about 400 still pictures. After deciding that I simply didn’t have time to go through all the video, I settled on the nearly 1400 photos plus about 200 I had already in stock for the area.

The first task was weeding out the junk. Like 30 pictures of ducks and fish swimming together in Lake Powell. And duplicates of shots that differ only in exposure. It took me about 4 hours to narrow down the library to 358 photos.

Then I discovered that there’s some kind of bug in iMovie HD that makes the Ken Burns effect controls choke on images over a certain resolution. Of course, Richard’s camera shot everything at 10 megapixels. That meant cropping or down-sampling his photos for the job. Even then, iMovie was acting unreliably.

I was getting nowhere fast and quickly running out of time.

I burned a DVD with two movies on it. I wasn’t very happy with the results.

There had to be a better way.

Long story short: I stumbled upon the Send to iDVD command in iPhoto. I soon discovered that this command exports an iPhoto slide show (which is infinitely easier to put together than an iMovie slide show) as a high resolution QuickTime move. That movie can be imported into iMovie or iDVD.

So since about 1 PM today, I’ve been knocking out slideshow movies. I’m creating them on my MacBook Pro and sending them over the network to my dual G5 where I’m adding them to an iMovie project. I’ve done seven slideshow movies so far and have three more to go. Looks like I might actually finish today.

More details on request. Use the Comments link.

How to Publish a Video Podcast with WordPress

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Article on Informit.com

My latest article for Informit.com has finally been published there.

From the introduction to “Publish a Video Podcast with WordPress“:

Maria Langer’s helicopter jaunts are too spectacular to be described with mere words; adding video podcasts to her web site would give visitors a taste of the thrill they’d be buying when they signed up for a trip. In this article, Maria takes us on a tour of the software that made it all possible.

I didn’t write that. But I think it’s funny, so I figured I’d quote it.

If you’re interested in using WordPress to publish a video podcast, read the article. Due to copyright agreements with Informit.com, I can’t reproduce it here. But I may turn it into a podcast episode one day soon. Stay tuned.