WOW - have I been busy!

Knowing that spring break was an option to get a lot of work done on the blended course, I took advantage of it! My wife is a staff member at the College so she gets Friday off, but has had to work the entire rest of the week - so I did the same. I found out last week that my course has changed from a Thursday afternoon 75 minute class to a Monday afternoon 50 minute class - just in time because if I did this much work and had the course moved on me it wouldn't have been a pretty sight where I exploded all over the place. Fortunately I knew so I could build the course the right way the first time. Since this blog is partially a trail for those who follow behind I am going to be as specific as I can regarding what software was used for each step of production.

My first step was to update the calendar with the new information and make sure I had the right material planned for the right weeks (missing that Monday on Labor day was kind of tough since that is the only day I see them for the entire week - I filmed a 16 minute video that I hope will get them started on the project. Once I confirmed the semester and weekly dates I created a weekly introduction in Word. Tom Cantu was right (again) having done one week's complete set of pages did make it easier to copy and paste into each week. Using Word I created a weekly intro and the copied it into Dreamweaver (which I prefer for creating HTML pages - a lot more control of how it looks and acts). I talked about the calendar snapshots last week, I incorporated those into each week's introduction and used Photoshop to add a touch of color into the top left corner of each week since I thought they looked a bit flat and antiseptic on the page. Following the calendar I outline what needs to be done to wrap up the current week's topic (homework) and what needs to be done to get ready for next week (reading and quizzes). Here is a picture of week six now that it is done. Once all fifteen weeks of introductions were created and connected to the apporpriate style sheet and calendar images I moved on to video production.

The video software I used is Premier Pro CS4 from Adobe. It's a great package, with a pretty high learning curve so I wouldn't suggest it if all you want are a few short intro videos for each week - I'm sure there is something easier to use out there. I used a Panasonic camcorder that is about four years old to record my first video - an introduction to the syllabus and course calendar. The video itself is 12:52 (12 minutes and 52 seconds) and took an entire day to create and produce. The filming was rather easy, my camcorder has a remote so I can start and stop the recording while being in front of the camera. It also has an LCD screen that flips completely over so I can see myself while I'm filming - very helpful. Once filmed I was digitize the image from inside of Premier using something they call "capture." With capture - and a firewire cable - I can control the camcorder from the computer keyboard and turn on the digital recording when the tape has reached the right moment. Once captured, Premier saves it as an "AVI" file (Audio Video Interleave if you are interested) and it is HUGE - the 12:52 video was 2.77 GIGABYTES! Fortunately I was eventually able to produce it in a small web format that is only 42 meg (which is still huge if you are lacking broadband at your house). Once in Premier Pro I added some special effects (each page of the syllabus and calendar is superimposed on the screen at the appropriate time. I also use a graphic that outlines the course sequence (which was developed in Illustrator and then imported into Photoshop for some clean-up before being saved a PNG (Portable Network Graphics) files. Once complete I was hoping the production for the web would be easy - wrong! Adobe Media Encoder kept throwing errors when I tried to output as either an FLV or F4V format. When I finally gave up on the Media Encoder I went to Adobe Encore with an "Adobe Dynamic Link" that would suck in the entire video (with the edits and special effects) and output either FLV or F4V as long as you want a lot of other junk along with those files. I ended up producing the files (junk and all) and the reaching into the destination folder and pulling out the one file I wanted and erasing the rest. Once I had the F4V file I knew I could put that file into a playback wrapper inside of Flash, so I opened Flash - used a playback component called "SkinUnderPlayStopSeekFullVol" to give the user the controls I think they would want. Before producing the files I had to set the publish settings for the HTML to allow full screen mode. I was also able to choose the lovely bluish purple color that is more in keeping with the rest of the site. I will link to a sample video so you can see what I'm talking about. This first video took me an entire day - the next nineteen videos only took me two more days to create. Each one captured and edited in Premier, converted to a M4V in Encore, then put into a wrapper in Flash. Here is the video that goes with week six that was shown above.

One video, the solution to the midterm exam hands-on section, was captured in Camtasia since there was no need for live video. Using Camtasia version 6 (I hear that Version 7 is on the horizon) I was able to capture everything but the opening title. Since I wanted the title to be similar to the other videos (which had titles created in Premier Pro using the title feature) I used Snagit 9 to grab a copy of a title created in Premier about the midterm. That worked pretty well, and the Camtasia file is certainly a lot smaller than the live action videos.

Once the videos were produced the last step was to link them to the pages created earlier in the week. That was done using Dreamweaver to set the links and set each video with a "_blank" target so they will open up in a separate screen. The separate browser screen was done so that I know the students can resize the browser so it is big enough to show the entire video. They are mostly produced at 640x480 and I don't want that image to get stuck below all of the WebCT navigation framework - especially since the controls are at the bottom of the screen.

To recap - the working files for the video include 217 files spread across 120 folders, and take up 14 GIGABYTES of space. Once the output files from the videos have been placed into the framework for the rest of the content i ended up with 191 files spread across 42 folders and taking up 551 meg of space. The live video started out with 1 hour, 2 minutes, and 5 seconds of material (on a one hour tape - after I was done I realized I only had 28 seconds of tape left in the camcorder - whew!) and ended up as 56 minutes and three seconds of video spread across 19 pieces across the site. The site is certainly not done - now all of these files have to be plugged into the WebCT structure for on thing - but I got a LOT done this week. I'm guessing I spent 35+ hours on this project over the last five days. I think I might just make the deadline for this fellowship!

John