Pedagogical Posturing

I’m creating this post in ScribeFire which is a Firefox plug-in that allows you to post to your blog directly from a little pop-up window that appears when you click the ScribeFire icon in the browser. Let’s see how it turns out. Technologically, I created a video for YouTube yesterday, using my Sony camcorder. I imported the video in wmv format to my laptop using Windows Movie Maker. The video, just under 3 minutes in length, was about 33 megabytes in size and I used a program called Ultra Flash Video to convert the file to flv format, which is the format in which all videos are displayed on YouTube.

The program seems to be free but can only process one file at a time, whereas batch processing is enabled in the $29.95 version. I used the default settings are created a 3Mb flv video with terrible audio and video quality. I played around with the settings, some of which simply led to an error, but eventually I succeeded in producing a high quality flv video that was 18Mb in size using the following settings: Video frame rate: 30fps; Video bit rate: 1304, Audio sample rate (kHz): KHz, Audio bit rate: 160. 6Mb per minute is a little over the top for a 320 x 240 video but I was getting frustrated and finally settled on something that worked. I’m not overly impressed with Ultra Flash Video, which only works with Windows, and will look around for an alternative. Here’s the video anyway: