Making videos

One of our regular readers asked how I made the videos. First of all, my new camera, a Canon PowerShot SD400, takes video. This makes it easy to upload digital moving images to the computer. I use a free program called Picasa to upload and manage both still and video shots. The still shots and video thumbnails are then uploaded to the web using another free program called Hello. Both these programs and Blogger itself were developed by the Google people, so they play pretty nicely together.

March 2009 update: Picasa has been updated so that it uploads to the web directly, and Hello is not needed anymore.

Blogger stores still photos for us for no charge, although there is a limit on how many pictures they will host. We haven't reached that limit yet; when we do, I'll have to find another solution. Blogger does not host video, however.

March 2009 update: Blogger does host video now, through Google video.

I stumbled upon this site, Freevlog, which has an easy to follow tutorial on how to post video to your blog (blog + video = vlog, get it?). If you just want the summary, here goes: convert the uploaded video from the camera using Windows Movie Maker, save in nicely compressed web-friendly format, upload to a free video storage site such as blip.tv, then link to video on Blogger. Easy, but a bit time-consuming at the uplink speeds our Datastorm provides.

I tried to use Freevlog's suggested video storage sites, OurMedia and Internet Archive, but was not successful. Supposedly the Internet Archive will store the video forever. I'm not sure what blip.tv's policy is. It is unclear on their site. Blip.tv is still in beta, so it could disappear tomorrow. For now, though, as I practise this whole video thing, it is good enough.

March 2009 update: Blip.tv seems to be going strong. They've improved their format, and I've been satisfied with them. I've tried YouTube and Google video, but keep coming back to Blip.tv.