FET 5622 Assignment 2.3 - Penny Gardner

One of Gus's tanks of cichlids in Sept 2005

 

Link to FET5622 Home PageLink to activity 3.2 - Haiku gif with text in downloaded font.Link to activity 3.4 - decorated haiku - two versionsLink to Activity 3.5 - red centre images #1Link to animated haiku activity 3.6This is a link to the car animationThis is a link to the edited sound fileThis is a link to the haiku readingThis is a link to the car web movieThis is a link to the haiku web movie

 

 

 

 

 

 

This page contains the video activities:

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Activity 3.11 Car in Web Movie Format

 

I downloaded a trial version of Camtasia to prepare this and found it very easy to use (whilst grumbling about all the time wasted on Windows Movie Maker, see below).

File size 39Kb

Skills gained during this activity:

I found that by compressing the sound using MACE 3.1 I could increase the video quality to high, 1000s of colours and still be well within the required file size. There is a trade off between audio and video and it's a matter of experimenting to get something that looks and sounds acceptable. I first tried adding a title and fade effect using Camtasia (on a 30 day trial) and the file size was huge - a more economical method is to add text to the animated gif before importing it.

I leaned a LOT about all the different codes you can use to incorporate media files in web pages. The most helpful source of coding was the University of Illinois at Chicago, which suggested using 'embed' tags inside the 'object' tags so that it would work with Firefox as well as Internet Explorer. It worked!

Using Windows Movie Maker? - Forget it!

When I first tried this with Windows Movie Maker, the first frame was black and could not get it to work with a relative reference, and had to use an absolute one. Windows movie maker exported it with a 16:9 aspect ratio, which distorted it terribly, but I adjusted the display window to 300x100 (including the controller) and this seemed to fix the problem in Internet Explorer but it would not play in Firefox (see below). The file size of the wmv file was 82Kb.

You may not see this earlier version of the movie in a Firefox browser. Even in Internet Explorer it does some strange wobbling when the window moves up and down!

Blank space??

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Activity 3.11 Haiku in Web Movie Format

 

I recorded the voice over and edited the music using WavePad sound recording, then combined them and imported the WAV file into a Camtasia project. The music is Mozart's Concerto in F, played by Al Bowles, wav file downloaded from his website: 'Al's piano music'.

On the first attempt, I imported the animated gif file into Camtasia and added a voice over, timing it to link with the images. After ten attempts at recording, an audible version was achieved but there was a lot of interference caused by the cheap microphone and the noisy fan of my pc (despite covering it with several pillows to try and muffle it). Camtasia doesn't give many options for sound editing, and only allows one extra audio track so I went back to WavPad which is a specialist audio editing programme to imrpove the sound quality and balance.

File size 337Kb

Skills gained during this activity:

I learned that you need more than one programme to create a high quality product. The frame rates in the animation need careful timing to align with the audio and the two must end simultaneously to avoid a blank screen at the end. I used MACE 3.1 compression for the sound, 22050 Hz 8 bit mono and high quality, 1000s of colours for the video. Before compressing the sound, the file was much too big, and compression had no noticeable effect on quality.

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References

Bowles, A, (2002) Al's Piano Music, 'Mozart Concerto in F' accessed 8 October 2006: http://members.aol.com/fssalhb/index.html

Cooltext.com: accessed 24 September 2006 http://cooltext.com/

TechSmith: Camtasia Studio Presentation: accessed 8 October 2006 http://www.techsmith.com/

University of Illinois at Chicago, Nov 14 2002, Embedding Quicktime Movies in a webpage, accessed 1 October 2006: http://www.uic.edu/depts/accc/itl/realmedia/code/embed_quicktime.html

WavePad Audio Editing Software, NCH Swift Sound, accessed 24 September 2006: http://www.nch.com.au/wavepad/masters.html

 

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Author: Penny Gardner W0031478, Course FET 5622 with Dr Peter Evans

This page last updated on 10 October, 2006