Videos
A collection of short videos capturing life on the go: cycling along Vermont’s Colchester Causeway, pedal‑blending smoothies, lightning storms and the occasional wildlife cameo. These clips are little windows into our travels and everyday adventures.
- Made the stingers 5 seconds long. The first ones were 7 seconds and just a little too long.
- I added the Creative Commons license information that I apply to my videos so it is clear what terms apply to reuse of the video.
- My first stingers weren’t as high-resolution and didn’t look as good in HD.
- I made sure the aspect ratio defaulted to widescreen.
New Video Stingers (v2)
A little over a year ago I created a handful of stingers to use on video content that I create. The stinger serves a bunch of purposes. On the practical side it gives the movie player and data stream to get going. I often notice that in the first couple of seconds of video there are some breaks and with a stinger that happens before the content starts. Also, you can name your site and show what license terms apply to it (the later is something I forgot to do in my first stingers).
I decided to redo them and improved a number of things:
Several of my friends asked me how I create my stingers. It is really easy actually. I use Keynote to make the stinger itself, using transition effects that are on a timer. I then export the presentation to a Quicktime movie. I import the Quicktime movie of the transitions into iMovie and do trimming as well as adding audio. I then export them out of iMovie and re-import the completed stingers into iMovie to use in other videos. It sounds more complicated than it is. If you would like to use my Keynote file to start with go ahead and download Video Stingers v2.1.key.
For fun, here are the five new stingers.
Convergence
Flip
Zoom
Fade
Spinner
It’s hard to make these go both on the web and on a large television. I might have to make everything bigger and thicker on these.
Update: I did a recut because I didn’t like how the video looked at very small files. I also made it work better with 4:3 aspect ratio as needed.
Video: Open Internet
This is a really great video that explains in plain language why Net Neutrality is so vitally important.
Kawishiwi Falls
While we were up in Ely this past weekend we took a brief hike out to Kawishiwi Falls. I’m a sucker for waterfalls so it doesn’t take much to fill me with awe. I took video with the Canon 5D Mark II to capture the scene and continue to get comfortable with the video capabilities of the camera.
Overall I’m very impressed with the video quality. What you see here is “web video” processed by at least three different conversion processes. The raw video off the camera is incredibly crisp. All these were shot with the Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS.
I photographed this waterfall in winter during the Wintergreen Photography Dog Sledding trip I took.
TED Video: Hans Rosling Dataset Mindset
The visuals in this talk by Hans Rosling at TED blew me away. Animated displays of 200 years of economic data about the world.
Learning to Make Sausage
A couple of weekends ago we all loaded up into the car and drove up to Grand Marais to spend a wonderful weekend with our friends the Tangen’s. As is often the case when going “up north”, it was really crazy cold. It was the end of May and on our last day it was barely above freezing.
Anyway, the main attraction of the trip was a class that Tammy had signed Kent and I up for at the North House Folk School. North House is a very cool place where you can go and learn hundreds of skills. While we were learning the in’s and out’s of sausage making, another group of people were learning how to build a brick oven.
Back to the sausage. Another friend, Kevin Dotzenrod, makes the most amazing sausage I’ve ever eaten. I’ve got a few feet of it left in the freezer that I’m coveting from everyone else. I really only like lean sausage with a lot of flavor. Tammy thought it would be fun for me to learn how to make it myself and that’s how Kent and I found ourselves elbow deep in meat.
The experience was captured best with video. Since I was running the camera this video is all Kent. I am excited to try my hand at making some of my own sausage just the way I like it.
Mazie Mastering her Skuut
It was the first weekend in April, but that didn’t get it warm. In fact we had snow overnight this weekend and woke up to at least an inch of wet snow in the morning. That didn’t stop us from heading outside and for Mazie to spend some more time mastering her Skuut. She is very excited to “get a bicycle and not even need stabilizers”.
Mazie Sings Santa Claus is Coming to Town
Mazie really got into Christmas this year. It made Christmas so much more fun for me this year just to see the excitement and enthusiasm she had for the big day. She started to sing along to some of the Christmas Music we had playing and were singing to ourselves and really got into Santa Claus is Coming to Town.
Shortly after Christmas she picked up her guitar and gave her own rendition. Cutest video ever. :-)
Kiva Impact
I’ve been a Kiva user for over a year now and have done several micro-loans with it. This is a really cool video that shows the personal side of Kiva and how such micro-loans can really impact peoples lives.
Check out my lender page. I owe a thanks to Aaron Oliver for introducing me to Kiva with a gift, to regift through a loan.