Laddish Family Web

WWW laddish.net

Web Events: Creating Videos

• Simple event process: overview, load files on pc, photo gallery, announce
• Special event process: overview, load files on pc, trip web, itineraries, intro pics, panoramas, photo galleries, backdrops, videos
• Optional extras: people photo galleries
• Time Required: ~1 hour per file

Select

• Run Elements: Load Adobe Photoshop elements, select your event tag to limit the number of files you see. Now select view->Media Types, and unselect all entries except for video. This will make it easy to focus on just the videos for your trip.
• Rate and Rename: Typically, we'll only want to upload the top 1-4 video clips. Make sure your best ones are rated 4 and 5. Other good ones you don't want to upload now should be rated 3. We've ignored 2 and 1 star ratings at this time. For all of these videos, make sure they have a good caption, and that the caption is also saved in the filename.

Create

Run this step for each of your top videos, 1 at a time.

• Premiere Elements:
  • Run: Right click on the video and select "Send to Premiere Elements". That program will now load. It will ask you for a project name and project directory. Accept the defaults (we don't care to keep the premeire project long term) and press ok to overwrite the existing project if asked.
  • Add to Timeline: You will now see your video in the Media window. You may or may not see it in the timeline window. If you don't see it in the timeline window, right click on your video clip in the media window and select insert.
  • Optimize: You may want to add filters to improve the sound or video quality. This is optional, and I usually skip it.
  • Trim: You may want to change the start and end point of your video to focus on the best parts. You can do this by dragging the left and right brackets in the DVD marker line of the Timeline window. It won't affect play mode in the monitor window, but it will be checked when you export the video.
  • Select filename into your text buffer: Click on your filename twice in the Media window, and it will allow you to rename the file. Do not rename it, but select Control-C to copy the contents to your text buffer. You'll reuse this name later for your exported video. After this is done, select the timeline window again to enable the export command. You can also copy & paste it from the name field in the Photoshop elements organizer.
  • Export Video: Select file->export->windows media. This will bring up a dialog asking you what quality profile you wish to use. We're creating web based videos, not DVDs, so we'll use custom settings. Select Custom->"RSL Camera 640x480x30fps, 1200kbps" as your profile. I've found this works best for my Sony camera. If you don't have this profile or if your camera creates other movie types, you'll want to create a new profile. It's not hard to create new profiles, you'll just need to set some time aside to play so you can adjust the values. Select ok, and it will ask you where you want to save the file. Change to your trip folder and create the video sub-folder if needed. The filename field will be blank. Hit control-V to paste the text buffer, add a year/month/day prefix as noted below and change the suffix to .wmv. If you trimmed your video, you'll want to change the "export range" setting to "work area". Press save and wait for it to complete. This can take anywhere from 5-30 minutes per video depending on the speed of your computer, the length of the video, and the export profile settings.
  • Export Frame: Next we'll need to save a picture that best represents the video. Move the marker in the timeline window to scroll through your movie to select the best picture. Now select file->export->frame. In the export frame window, select yothe video filename you just created as we wish to use the same base filename. Now press settings, select jpeg, press ok, and the filename will now change to have a .jpg suffix. Press save to save the frame.
  • Empty Media: In the media window, right click on each entry (you should have a video and an exported frame) and select cut. After all entries are cut, all windows should be blank. It may warn you that it will delete items from the timeline, select ok, as we want to do this. Close the application if this is your last video, or go back to Photoshop Elements Organizer and select the next video and send to premiere elements. Since you left the application open, the new file will load quickly, and the default save folder will be in the right place. Once you're familiar with this process, we recommend that you upload one video while you're creating the next.
• Directory and filename suggestions: Save the video into the appropriate sub-folder for your event. You'll need to create it for your first video. It's important to use the filename format shown below in case we choose to place all our video files in the same folder later on. Note the filename prefix tells the year, month, day, and time in a YYYY_MMDD_HH.MM format. For example, Rob used these values for one of his trips:
  • Folder: d:\robl\My Archive\Collections\web\2005\0327.tasmania_overland_hike\videos
  • Filename: 2005_0327_14.07b. panorama of Sydney.wmv

Upload

• Microsoft FrontPage:
  • Open Web: Start Microsoft FrontPage. Select File->Open Site. Enter the web site, such as laddish.org or hikepics.laddish.net. For username and password, ask Rob or see the help on that web site. Navigate down to your event folder in the folder list.
  • Drag and Drop: Open a My Documents window, and navigate to the video collections folder for your event on your local PC, this is the same directory that you saved your videos in. Either drag and drop the videos folder to your event web page, or create a video folder on the web site for your event and drag and drop each video and frame image.
  • Create Video Links in Video Table: Open the large.shtml file for your event, and scroll down to the videos table. Delete all entries except for the top 2 table rows. (header and 1 data row) For the first data row, empty the cells but keep the row. Enter date/time, description, owner, and dimensions. These will be common with your other rows. Expand the videos sub-folder in the folder list. right click on the .jpg file for your first video and drag it into the file cell. Select "Create Thumbnail". It will now show a nice small picture for your video. Right click on this small picture, select hyperlink properties, and change the suffix to .wmv. Now when people click on it, it will play your video. Select this entire row, copy and paste it, and fill out the information for your next video. Repeat this process until all videos have a row in the table.
  • Update Video Table: Go back to your windows explorer window that shows the videos on your local system. Change the view to details, and right click in the header row and select duration. Move the duration column next to the Size column.
  • Save Large File: When you save the file, it will raise a "Save Embedded Files" window asking you where to save the thumbnails you just created. If the you just created a video and the folder is set to /events/.../videos/thumbs, press ok. If not, press the change folder button, and navigate back to your event web folder, then into the video sub-folder, and create and select a new folder named thumbs if it does not exist. Press ok for the folder selection window, then ok for the save embedded files window, and your thumbnails will be saved to the videos/thumbs subfolder.
  • Validate: Open a web browser, go to your event web site, and look at the large file. Does the video table look ok? When you click on the video files, do they open and play on your computer? If not, go back and fix things now.
  • Update site-wide Video Collections page: Go back to the Folder list, scroll to the bottom and open up the videos.shtml collection file. Copy and paste your videos folder from the large.shtml file into the videos.shtml file. Place it into a special section for your trip, and update the hyperlinks to find this section from the top of the file, and to point to your trip html files from the new section. It's usually easiest to copy and past another event section from that file, then edit it as needed. Note that the newly pasted table will point to the videos and thumbnails back in your event web site. Pretty cool! We place a copy of your files in this global collection file to allow people to see all videos at once.
  • Save and Validate: Save the site-wide video collections page, and navigate to it with your web browser. Make sure all the links work ok, and try opening a file or two.