[IAEP] Read Etexts Videos available

[Jim Simmons]

Caroline,

I could probably add music with Cinelerra.  I printed off the 200+
pages of the manual and put it in a binder but haven't read it yet.
I'm in the middle of coding improvements to my Activities now and that
is my first priority.  Apparently thousands of people are downloading
my Activities, but my Read Etexts video has only been played 8 times
(4 of which were probably just me).

Dave C could probably add music to my videos if he's so inclined.  I'm
partial to "Les Preludes" by Franz Listz (AKA the Flash Gorden theme.
Buster Crabbe version, not the later atrocity with music by Queen).  I
seem to recall you liked the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairies, so maybe
that one for the other video about Get Internet Archive Books and
Read.

Another thing I've noticed is that most Sugar videos on Daily Motion
are Official Content, which apparently means someone is paying money
so the videos can be shown without commercials popping up at the
bottom.  It would be nice if my videos or some version thereof could
be adopted as Official Content.

Not sure what you mean by annotations.  My videos certainly have title
cards.  What else is needed, besides some thrilling music?

James Simmons


On Thu, Aug 20, 2009 at 6:17 PM, Caroline
Meeks<caroline at solutiongrove.com> wrote:
> Hi James,
> This is good! But it would be better with music and annotations.
> I know we want to be using daily motion because it doesn't use Flash.
> But YouTube looks like it has tools that makes what we want to do much
> easier.  Adds music with guaranteed usage rights and annotations.  I wonder
> if we can add those things on YouTube, then download it as MP4 and upload to
> dailymotion?
> http://screencast.com/t/9uiIVx9ikAf
>
> On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 10:47 AM, Jim Simmons <nicestep at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Dave and David,
>>
>> Yesterday I did a screen capture of Read Etexts in action, then fired
>> up Kino to edit it and add title cards.  The results are not awful,
>> but perhaps could be improved with better editing software.  I have
>> posted the original capture in Ogg Video format, plus my finished
>> product which is an AVI using Xvid and Mp3 for video and audio
>> encoding.  The URL is:
>>
>> http://people.sugarlabs.org/jdsimmons/
>>
>> My original capture was of Sugar running at 800x600.  I had originally
>> tried capturing at 1000x600, but when Kino imports the Ogg Video it
>> resizes everything to 640x480 (I think) and does not preserve the
>> aspect ratio.  As a result the Activity ring becomes an ellipse
>> instead of a circle.  I had to modify Read Etexts to work better in
>> 800x600 than it did originally.  Unfortunately, when Kino resizes the
>> capture it makes the text on the captured screens hard to read.  We
>> could probably live with this if we had to, but I'm hoping that Dave's
>> Final Cut Pro might do a better job resizing the video.
>>
>> I think my editing job is reasonably good.  I had originally had a
>> "The End" title card on this that got lost somehow.
>>
>> If Kino would support it I would have liked to have added a musical
>> background.  Ever since I saw Flash Gordon serials as a child I've
>> been partial to Listz's "Les Preludes".  The music is in the public
>> domain, but I doubt I could find a performance of it that is.  I could
>> get around this by recording myself playing it on a kazoo.  I think
>> you'd need more than one kazoo to really do it justice, though.
>>
>> Anyway, have a look at the two videos and see what you think.
>>
>> James Simmons
>
>
>
> --
> Caroline Meeks
> Solution Grove
> Caroline at SolutionGrove.com
>
> 617-500-3488 - Office
> 505-213-3268 - Fax
>