The single best turkey I’ve ever made, eaten, smelled, eaten, and eaten. Wow. The only one I’ve made that looked better was the 25-pounder I cooked with my cousin a few years back, and while that was tasty, this year’s knocked it out of the park.
Now I’ve been posting a lot of recent stuff on non-techie topics, and I’m feeling a little guilty about that, so I’m going to amend for it all here. This post also contains vlogging, a quick intro to Muvee, and my first use of Stage6 from DivX (quick disclaimer: I am doing some consulting work for DivX, although it is wholly unrelated to turkey cooking).
First up: the vlogging. I used my trusty Canon SD700is (recently rendered obsolete with the SD800is) to do all the video work. Sure I could’ve used my DV camera, but I didn’t care that much about the final video quality, and didn’t want to spend all the time downloading the video from the miniDV tape. Also, my wife and I did all camera work, no tripods, microphones, or anything fancy was involved.
Next comes the editing. My first video project, I did all the editing myself. From the notes I took, I spent 13 minutes importing and editing clips, 20 minutes working with transitions, photos, and titles/credits, then 11 minutes to export the video, for a total of 44 minutes. You can see the video here (running time 4:50), I feel it’s the most informative, yet dullest of the batch.
What’s this? Batch? Yes, that’s correct, I have created multiple videos. The next three were all done using Muvee AutoProducer, which is one of the most impressive pieces of software I’ve seen in years. I’ll do a full review shortly, and this is not the best demonstration of its power, but I wanted to do an easy “compare and contrast.” It took 6 minutes to import all content and create titles/credits and pick a style for the video. It took another 4 minutes to analyze the media files (a one-time only requirement), and I had my first video ready. Over the next 10 minutes I experimented with different styles until I had the one I liked, then waited 13 minutes while it exported the video, for a total time investment of 33 minutes.
The really impressive part was I then spent less than 10 minutes to preview a dozen more styles, and generated two additional videos in another 10 minutes. To see the fruits of my labor (and you should watch one of them in contrast to my manual editing work), watch style one, two, or three (I recommend #1). As you’ll see, all three are more entertaining and upbeat than the manually produced version. Muvee is awesome, and I’ll really prove it in the next few weeks with a detailed review.
For my last tech experiment of the day, rather than go with YouTube, I decided to try out Stage6 for my video-sharing needs. Creating a profile was simple and took a few seconds (although I decided to actually flush it out with all the personal details too, but that was not a requirement), but uploading a video wasn’t as straightforward as I’d hoped.
First, I was required to download an uploader (although I think there was a plug-in version as well, but I may have accidentally missed that), then I realized my videos weren’t in DivX format already, a requirement of the site. I proceeded to download Dr. DivX, after which I was prompted to download a DivX codec update. Pain in the rear, however, Dr DivX worked really quickly and flawlessly, and coincidentally included a built-in uploader to Stage6.
Several minutes later, I began uploading videos, and am now officially a member of the long tail. And I didn’t even have to use clips from SNL or the Daily Show to participate! Ni-ice. As you noticed from the post, the only way to really share videos from Stage6 is via linking or email.
I’d like to see them step up the features for bloggers by including some HTML sharing code, embedding tools, and thumbnails. Also, while I know the codec is huge in Europe (just like David Hasselhoff), I am curious to hear back from readers if there were any issues playing the videos
Anyhow, I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving, full of turkey and techie, just like me!
Stage 6 used to have support for embedded videos, but they disabled it after they weren’t getting enough hits to the actual site. I think that this was a serious mistake. YouTube makes it so easy to embed videos and that’s a large part of their charm and how they attracted so many visitors to begin with. This leaves little incentive for video bloggers and regular bloggers to evangelize the site. The only content that does seem to get uploaded to stage 6 is a lot of pirated Japanese animation. I love the quality on stage 6, but without a good way to share that, there’s no way the site will ever take off in the way that they’d like. Instead of disabling the the embeded links, they should have figured out a way to drive visitors to the site to see full screen content.
Nice bird by the way