Hello! This is my first post here, so let me explain why I joined this group.
For over four years I have been teaching a college level course where students from the US exchange short videos with students at universities in other countries. In 2001-02 we worked with Russian students in Moscow, in 2002-03 and 2003-04 we worked with Belarusan students in Minsk and this year we are doing a three way exchange with students in Istanbul,Turkey and Mexico City. I teach at SUNY/Purchase in both the Film and New Media Programs and my class is also open to other students - if they can talk their way in. 8>) The course runs for a full year and involves a lot of background reading on the cultures with whom we work and a lot of exploration of surrealist production techniques like the exquisite corpse, because we use these methods in the class. In fact the main production model we use is one where students first write paragraphs that form stories, than design images that make up mini-graphic novels and finally shoot and edit video scenes that build into longer video pieces. These are developed by being passed back and forth over the Internet amongst small student teams, as the students try to create audio-visual meanings across cultures. If you would like to see some of this work it is visible here: http://rachel.ns.purchase.edu/~jrubin/ What we are doing is not exactly videoblogging, but it is very related. The students all shoot MiniDV and in the past we have used DivX to compress the five minute videos down to 40 - 80MB full-frame videos and then we have sent them to each other by FTP. Posting them online was NOT part of the process. However, after the project was done we used FlixPro to convert them to much smaller Flash files which are what you see on the web site. I am posting here both because I thought that some videobloggers might find this project interesting, but also because I am considering moving to a videoblog format this year and figured that I might get some good advice from participants in this group. I guess the main thing preventing me from going the videoblog route so far is that I want video quality that is good enough to work when projected in a small theatre. I was amazed at how good the DivX files looked projected in front of 100 people, but once these files were whacked down to 320 x 240 they just were not acceptable. I am looking into the new Flash video format in hopes that this could be done in one step - but I'm not sure the technology is there yet. I also have some questions about videoblog formats, since what I need would be a multi-threaded, team videoblog, where many students could post to the same blog - but I have taken up a lot of space already, so I will close here. I hope some of you will find the project of interest. I hope to expand it to other venues in the future. Jon Rubin ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> Fair play? Video games influencing politics. Click and talk back! http://us.click.yahoo.com/T8sf5C/tzNLAA/TtwFAA/lBLqlB/TM --------------------------------------------------------------------~-> Yahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/videoblogging/ <*> To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <*> Your use of Yahoo! Groups is subject to: http://docs.yahoo.com/info/terms/
