If the walk is something you would like to participate in next year, join our Blacksburg Photo Walkers Facebook group to learn more.

Now there is music everywhere online and anyone can create and distribute their musical works, which makes things a little more complicated. More rules can be broken and more rights violated. You have to worry about proper attribution, personal vs. commercial licenses, creative commons licenses, etc. Not to mention, it’s very difficult to explain all of these things to students when they are so used to seeing videos online that may violate artists’ rights.

The good news is there might be a light at the end of the tunnel! Vimeo.com now has a music store! Hooray! Yet another great reason why I love this site.

Check it out:

There are free (creative commons) music clips and ones that you pay for ($1.99 for a personal license and $98.00 for commercial.) If you ask me, $1.99 for a track that you know you have the right to use for a class assignment or non-commercial production is a price worth paying. Check out the FAQs for more info.

Life in video production may have just gotten easier. Thanks, Vimeo. Happy editing!

Smile, we're taking your picture!

What a great turn out for this weekend’s Worldwide Photo Walk! I was afraid the cooler temperatures would keep people away, when it turned out that parking may have been the larger problem. Thanks to all who turned out for the walk. In this area, we had the largest number of participants with 35 signed up. We even had walkers join us from as far away as Florida! (They heard how great the leader for this walk was… or they were already in town visiting relatives. whatever.) It was great to meet you and I can’t wait to see your photos. Someone has to have a picture of that gorilla on the drillfield!

For any of you local folks reading this post, stay tuned for info about our gallery display that is scheduled for January.

Technically they are called smarTouch gloves, but still, isn’t that neat? They are made by Isotoner and you can wear them while using a touch screen device instead of taking your gloves off. The thumb and index fingers have some kind of special conductive thread that conveys an electric pulse to the touch screen.

Ah, technology!

If you’re interested in joining my walk or any other for that matter, you can go to the main Photo Walk page and search for a location near you: http://worldwidephotowalk.com. Be sure to register so that your leader can easily contact you. No register = no walky = no you.

Here’s what I recommend doing with a single-clip edit to make it ready to upload Vimeo. (I use Vimeo for online video. If you’re into YouTube, it is likely this will work, too. Just check to see if it accepts .m4v files.)

Copy the clip to your computer. You don’t want to leave the clip on your camera while you are editing or it may cause the clip to stutter while you are working with it in QTP.

Open the clip in QTP. (I’m using version 7.6.9.)

Save the file using File > Save As… and rename the file. Doing this will keep you from accidentally overwriting the original file in case you need it later.

Edit the clip, which, for me, usually means trimming off part of the beginning and part of the end.

(Step 1 on image.) Separate the sliders at the bottom of the controls to set the “in” and “out” points.

Note: The one on the left indicates the “in” point or the beginning of what will be the new clip. The one on the right indicates the “out” point or the end of what will be the new clip. The darker of the two sliders is the one that is currently active in the main window. The resulting darker grey area will eventually be the new clip.

If necessary, test the selection made by going to View > Play Selection Only and pressing the play button on the controls or pressing the space bar on your keyboard. Make adjustments as needed.

(Step 2 on image.) When you are satisfied with your selected clip, go to Edit > Trim to Selection. This will remove all but the darker grey area you selected earlier.

To prepare it for the Web, go to File > Export for Web… and an options window will appear.

(Step 3 on image.) Name the file and choose where to save it.

(Step 4 on image.) Choose the version for export.

I usually pick desktop because it is the highest quality and the file size is small enough to work with Vimeo.com’s limits (500MB per week). Typically my videos are no more than 5 minutes in length. If yours is longer than that, you may want to use the first iPhone setting in the list. The video quality of the iPhone (cellular) setting is too low for my tastes. If in doubt, choose all three and decide after QTP processes the video to see what works best with your needs.

(Step 5 on image.) Click Export and let the magic happen.

Note: I skipped the poster image option because, quite frankly, I’ve never used it and I don’t know what it does. I’m guessing it is allowing you to choose the frozen image that appears before someone presses play on your video, which isn’t a huge concern for most of my projects.

OK, now that you have edited and processed the video, go find it. Wherever you told QTP to save the video, you should find a folder with the same name in that location. Inside that folder, you will find a number of files. Something along the lines of video-iPhone.m4v, video-Desktop.m4v, video.mov, and ReadMe.html. If you’re a Web Wizard and don’t intend on uploading to Vimeo or YouTube, you can probably handle the ReadMe file and the code. If not, and you do intend on uploading to Vimeo or YouTube, skip that file because it will likely confuse you.

Instead, just focus on the files with the .m4v at the end. If you want to preview them, you can. If you’re on a Mac, you can select the video by clicking it one time and play it by pressing the space bar. You can also double-click the file and they will likely open in iTunes, QuickTime, or some other media player. This is true for a Mac or a PC. Either way, it doesn’t matter how you watch them on your own computer.

When you’re ready, pick the file you will upload based on your needs and personal preferences, and go to it! (Note: Even though a really tiny 4KB file was created as a .mov file, it’s not really your video. It’s a reference file. Do NOT use it to upload. It won’t work.)

A final note about this tutorial: I have not tried this with HD video yet because, well, it takes up a lot of space on my card. If I ever get around to it, I’ll see how it goes and report back the results.

Happy Editing!

Enter QuickTime Pro. Yeah, can you believe it?

There I was, trying to figure out the best way to make a simple edit and make the clip small enough to upload to Vimeo, using iMovie, the old (and preferred) iMovie, Final Cut, and Adobe Premiere. And here comes QuickTime swooping in as if it were Comic Sans acting like a superhero!

I have no idea when QuickTime Pro made its way onto my computer. I don’t recall ever buying it, but I will say, it’s worth the $30 if you’re editing something like a video blog or a single-camera video. What used to take me 30 minutes or more now only takes about 5.

Stay tuned… Next up, a little tutorial about how I use QTP for videos I record with my digital still camera.