RE: [biofuel] Video or Sound File of a Biofuel Making Class
I have the skill and equipment to produce a video. It won't look Hollywood and would be very basic, but I can definitely do it. I will also be able to create a limited number of DVDs and provide a high and low bandwidth version to be posted online. I've emailed Mark but haven't heard back from her yet. I hope that's just because she's been busy. The one problem is that I'm in Kansas City, Missouri and can't afford to travel out West. I'd only be able to do this if she was really going to be in the Midwest this summer. Ryan -Original Message- From: murdoch [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, June 03, 2004 1:09 PM To: biofuel@yahoogroups.com Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [biofuel] Video or Sound File of a Biofuel Making Class Last week in Albuquerque my friends and I built a system (and made liter batches and a fullsize batch of fuel)- and someone made a bad-quality home video of the process. it's too low-quality to edit into something presentable for public use, but watching it made me realize that a video of one of the classes would be a good tool for the public. It'd be good if it were possible to make it available on the internet, though I'm not sure what this takes in terms of bandwidth or other downloading issues. While you were away, there was some further brainstorming about this in the groups, and some debate over DVD, VHS, etc. But my thought was that while that tech talk is often interesting, it got away a little from the point. I don't have experience with video, but have been doing amateur digital still photography for awhile now. My guess (not that educated, but slightly) is that, particularly since I'm not an expert, I try to err on the side of shooting in the highest possible resolution available to me. Not just a matter of getting an expensive camera, but also one strongly affected by lighting (outdoor makes my life easier with my cheap digi-cams), the experience of the person shooting, their familiarity with their camera-equipment, whether they've taken an extra bit of time to prepare, etc. Could this be done successfully perhaps in one of your classes put forth in a city with one or two fans, or class-attendees, who might be willing to trade you a video shoot (and edit) for the class fee for x number of people? Maybe some money would have to change hands. I don't know video and its costs. With still photography, once you shoot in your high res camera, if you are not incompetent, you can edit down to a much smaller downloadable-friendly file that most people can live with the compromises in quality. I prefer to try to edit down from a high res file, because if you start with a low-res file and don't like it, there's not much you can do about it. For video, this might be harder or impossible, depending on the length of the file. If, for the sake of discussion, you shoot two full days of classes (I don't see why not), say 16 hours of classes that you want to make available to people to download, the only way I can see this is if they were shrunk down to a very very small screen size and low resolution, with reasonable resolution for the sound side, and then the folks might be able to squeeze it on to a computer. If you were to edit for highlights, say making your file anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours, then of course your file size would shrink and you might even be able to provide higher quality. You could also provide a link to a point-and-click way or folks to order the video on DVDs or VHS. All of this is a ton of work, I think. If you want to avoid every last bit of headache (I certainly would), but wouldn't mind seeing the video get made, maybe a video-making profit-oriented person could be incentivized to do it all for you, without much hassle-to-you, and then just send you your part of the royalties. They could make some video downloadable for free (and you could write this into your agreement, to ensure that not too much is held back as they try to calculate what to charge for and not charge for), but cripple it enough to make it somewhat desireable to pay the whole shebang for a DVD or VHS covering things in greater depth. You could also record just sound, which would not require all these problems and could easily be done. I just think it's a bit hard to get an idea of things with just sound. It might be easier to record video and then separate out the sound file and a few low-res still photos. As far as what Murdoch says about it potentially causing a drop in attendance at my workshops, I don't think that's a concern at all (and it would be fine if it did anyway, I'm not doing this to make money). The main problem for me is just the time involved in putting together a quality video sometime, and the large amount of work that goes into editing something like that (video production skill is something I completely lack and am not interested in learning at this time...) Anyway I'll put some thought
[biofuel] Video or Sound File of a Biofuel Making Class
Last week in Albuquerque my friends and I built a system (and made liter batches and a fullsize batch of fuel)- and someone made a bad-quality home video of the process. it's too low-quality to edit into something presentable for public use, but watching it made me realize that a video of one of the classes would be a good tool for the public. It'd be good if it were possible to make it available on the internet, though I'm not sure what this takes in terms of bandwidth or other downloading issues. While you were away, there was some further brainstorming about this in the groups, and some debate over DVD, VHS, etc. But my thought was that while that tech talk is often interesting, it got away a little from the point. I don't have experience with video, but have been doing amateur digital still photography for awhile now. My guess (not that educated, but slightly) is that, particularly since I'm not an expert, I try to err on the side of shooting in the highest possible resolution available to me. Not just a matter of getting an expensive camera, but also one strongly affected by lighting (outdoor makes my life easier with my cheap digi-cams), the experience of the person shooting, their familiarity with their camera-equipment, whether they've taken an extra bit of time to prepare, etc. Could this be done successfully perhaps in one of your classes put forth in a city with one or two fans, or class-attendees, who might be willing to trade you a video shoot (and edit) for the class fee for x number of people? Maybe some money would have to change hands. I don't know video and its costs. With still photography, once you shoot in your high res camera, if you are not incompetent, you can edit down to a much smaller downloadable-friendly file that most people can live with the compromises in quality. I prefer to try to edit down from a high res file, because if you start with a low-res file and don't like it, there's not much you can do about it. For video, this might be harder or impossible, depending on the length of the file. If, for the sake of discussion, you shoot two full days of classes (I don't see why not), say 16 hours of classes that you want to make available to people to download, the only way I can see this is if they were shrunk down to a very very small screen size and low resolution, with reasonable resolution for the sound side, and then the folks might be able to squeeze it on to a computer. If you were to edit for highlights, say making your file anywhere from 15 minutes to two hours, then of course your file size would shrink and you might even be able to provide higher quality. You could also provide a link to a point-and-click way or folks to order the video on DVDs or VHS. All of this is a ton of work, I think. If you want to avoid every last bit of headache (I certainly would), but wouldn't mind seeing the video get made, maybe a video-making profit-oriented person could be incentivized to do it all for you, without much hassle-to-you, and then just send you your part of the royalties. They could make some video downloadable for free (and you could write this into your agreement, to ensure that not too much is held back as they try to calculate what to charge for and not charge for), but cripple it enough to make it somewhat desireable to pay the whole shebang for a DVD or VHS covering things in greater depth. You could also record just sound, which would not require all these problems and could easily be done. I just think it's a bit hard to get an idea of things with just sound. It might be easier to record video and then separate out the sound file and a few low-res still photos. As far as what Murdoch says about it potentially causing a drop in attendance at my workshops, I don't think that's a concern at all (and it would be fine if it did anyway, I'm not doing this to make money). The main problem for me is just the time involved in putting together a quality video sometime, and the large amount of work that goes into editing something like that (video production skill is something I completely lack and am not interested in learning at this time...) Anyway I'll put some thought into making this happen someday. I don't have any time to deal with it for the next couple of months but will keep my ears open for some way to make an internet video available. mark At 08:00 AM 5/24/2004 -0700, you wrote: On Sun, 23 May 2004 22:03:55 -, you wrote: Hey Keith, After lurking and occationally posting on this list, I gotta agree with you guys about Fryer to the Fuel Tank. I use it mostly these days for doing test batches. But, considering the wealth of info you and Todd Swearington and Girlmark have, you ought to collectively write something that would at least give Fryer to the Fuel Tank a run for its money. 'specially considering your background in journalism. And it would be a great way to help support the work you guy are
