Number 291 - August 2007

Are You on YouTube Yet?
by Charlene Brown, Big Blue and Cousins, Victoria, BC July 07
We've all watched videos on Youtube. With almost 20 million visitors each month, the innovative site's popularity is staggering. YouTube was founded in February 2005, and proved so successful that, in November 2006, Google bought it for $1.65-billion and Time Magazine named it Invention of the Year 2006! Users upload thousands of new videos to the site every day--including movie and TV clips, music videos, video blogs and original videos.    YouTube is free. You only need to sign up if you want to leave comments about the videos, rate them, or upload your own. Categories include Autos & Vehicles, Film & Animation, Comedy, Entertainment, Gadgets & Games, How to & DIY. Politics, Pet & Animals, Travel, Sports. I recently decided to give it a try.    I'd never made a video before, except for a couple of accidental ones before I figured out the mode switch on my digital camera. (Surely, I'm not the only person who's done that) In fact, many of the videos on YouTube are taken with cell phones and digital cameras--but not usually by accident.    Getting some help from BB&C members who know more about it seemed like a good idea. Not surprisingly, Karin Lindewall, leader of the Showtime SIG, knows how to do it, has a couple of videos up on YouTube, and has plans for more. Several members of the Showtime SIG also are planning YouTube uploads.    See a short movie at YouTube link: www.youtube.com/watch?v=i5-sFNZYboE    My video, Painting Toronto, is a stop-frame, or time lapse, animation, a sequence of images of a landscape as it was created. I've done this before as an animated GIF, entirely on the	computer, using Photoshop and ImageReady. YouTube doesn't accept GIF format, so this was to be a series of photographs of a watercolour painting, over various periods of time totalling about three hours.    Normally, photographs for a stop-frame animation are carefully taken with the camera on a tripod, focused and centred on the painting, which is either not moved or placed in exactly the same position on a stand for each shot. I don't have a tripod, and the painting was usually too runny to place on a vertical stand anyway, so I laid it on the floor every few minutes and took its picture with the camera braced against the edge of the table--against three different tables, actually, as it was painted in three different locations. The pictures needed quite a bit of Photoshopping, a process I've detailed in the Cover Story on page 2, in order to look like they'd all been taken properly. www.bbc.org/newsletter/jul07nl/cover.php    I had planned to turn the resulting JPEGs into a YouTube-compatible format using Windows Movie Maker, but I learned at the Showtime SIG that the others had found they preferred working with PhotoStory3. I compared them and, even though PhotoStory is primarily for creating slide shows of still pictures, I decided it was better suited than Movie Maker to the production of an animation with customized sound effects.    PhotoStory, a free download from Microsoft, has instructions for importing, arranging and editing pictures, and will pan or zoom on each pictures and create transitions between pictures (remember, it is designed for slide shows). It should be noted, before starting, the program requires every frame to have a 4:3 aspect rather, which is the relation of width to height. Pictures (like mine) beginning and end of the picture's video clip. As it's very easy to edit the project as long as it's in .wp3 format, I tried many combinations of effects and ended up eliminating many of them.    You can also narrate your pictures, but I chose to write on them instead of having voice-over, adding background sound effects only. This can be done in two ways, by choosing a specific piece of music, or creating 'music' by customizing sound. I chose this method, which allows you to select musical style, mood, tempo and intensity, and results in a pretty odd-sounding video. With quite a lot of help from Stacey Falconer, I got the sound under control, and Joan McIlmoyl Cleghorn showed me how to vary the mood of the music for different parts of the video.    You need to open a YouTube account to upload your video. Then it's simply a matter of going to your Account page at www.youtube.com, clicking on Upload Videos and typing in the Title, Description, Category, and as many search tags as you can think of, to help people find it. Mine can be found by searching on the words "painting" and "Toronto" at YouTube www.youtube.com.
Number 291 - August 2007