It took me a while to figure it out.
I spent about 4 hours yesterday morning and another hour this morning publishing a video podcast for Flying M Air. Why so long? Because I couldn’t find a single how-to guide online to explain how to do it the way I wanted to get it done.
On Friday, I got back from a 3-1/2 day trip around the southwest with photographer Richard Noll. Rick and I took tons of pictures and video — much of which was from the air — of the places we visited. The goal of our trip was not only to perform a final check on travel, hotel, and tour arrangements for the Southwest Circle Helicopter Adventure, but to gather images I could use to market Flying M Air’s tours and excursions. I now have over 1,000 still images and 4+ hours of video to go through.
I spent some time early Saturday morning with iMovie and Jeff Carlson‘s excellent book, iMovie HD 6 and iDVD 6: Visual QuickStart Guide. The book has everything you need to know to create a great looking movie in iMovie HD, from choosing a video camera to building the movie with titles, transitions, and effects. It then goes on to discuss IDVD (which I’m not ready for yet). I learned a lot of things, including that I can reverse and slow down video clips — two effects I’ll need for my final project: a 20-minute promotional DVD.
Yesterday’s starter project was to build a slide show of images taken in the Phoenix area. The slide show would make good use of the Ken Burns effect to add motion to still images. I’d also included opening and closing titles, transitions, and music. It was a very simple project, and with Jeff’s guidance, I was able to knock it off in about an hour with about 15 slides. The final video is about 2-1/2 minutes long.
Although Jeff’s book discusses publishing a video podcast with iMovie and iWeb, I was not interested in using iWeb. It might be a great tool for Web publishing newbies, but it lacks the control features I need. (This might sound strange, but the software is so easy that it’s hard for an experienced user to use.) I wanted to publish a video podcast of this and future Flying M Air movies right on the blog-based Flying M Air Web site. This way, the videos would be available immediately to site visitors as well as by podcast to subscribers. I knew this was possible, but I couldn’t find any clear guidance on things like format (Was the export to iPod format the right one?), linking (Was it as easy as just including a link to the file?), and server settings (Did I have to modify .htaccess?).
I got the answers to all of these questions through Web research and trial-and-error. I got it working at about 5:30 AM this morning and was pleased to see the new podcast file being downloaded into iTunes. I then spent another hour tweaking the settings for Flying M Air’s WordPress theme files so instructions would appear onscreen when a site visitor checked the contents of the new Video & Slide Shows category.
Interested in seeing my first effort? You can download the m4v file (which can be viewed in iTunes or QuickTime) or subscribe to the podcast.
And if you’d like to read a how-to article that provides step-by-step instructions for publishing an iMovie project as a podcast with WordPress (rather than iWeb), keep checking in. I’ll write it up today, but Informit.com has first dibs. After all, I do like to be paid for my work.
Technorati Tags: aerial, Arizona, howto, iMovie, Macintosh, Phoenix, podcast, Windows, WordPress
I opened the box to remove my “shelf copy.” I have a kind of weird superstition. I have a bookshelf with five shelves where I keep a single author copy of every book I’ve ever written, along with the translations I’ve been sent. Three shelves are completely full; this book will start the fourth shelf. The books are placed on the shelf in order of publication, with their translations placed to their right. The English-language book that goes on the shelf is always the first one I get. Normally, for Peachpit Press books, I get a single advance author copy directly from the printer when the book is done. That’s the book that goes on the shelf. The box of author copies that comes later goes into storage for giveaways, etc. For other publishers’ books, the book that goes on the shelf is the first one I pull out of the box.
My QuickBooks 2006 for Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide, which was published last fall, was probably the very last book Peachpit published with the old cover style. I recall seeing other VQS titles on Peachpit’s Web site and talking to my editor about the new design. But this is my first book with the new design. I like it. It’s a little “cleaner” looking — whatever that means. Maybe more modern. The color scheme always changed from one book to the next, so that’s not the difference. It’s the extra white on the cover, I think. And less text in all those boxes. It looks good. And shiny.