Scenes from the extremes

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These videos were shot by George Wooten, Emily Owen and Nick Engelmann in 2011 to show a few scenes from the wilds of northern Argentina. The expedition was sponsored by Pacific Biodiversity Institute and led by Peter Morrison. Our goal is to map and protect the remaining roadless lands from becoming over-developed.

 

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Tips for setting up a video website

To make movies and share them online requires a lot of processing. This site creates movies in mp4 format and plays them as Flash (flv) files, because mp4 files are more compressed and because most browsers have Flash enabled. Useful tools include a video camera, microphone, video editor (Windows Movie Maker works OK), sound editor (e.g., Audacity), screen capture utility, image editor, and video converter (handbrake is excellent and doesn't try to install adware). To display videos on your own website requires a player. This site uses the JW player by Longtail Video. And you need a decent website with a control panel, like Bluehost, which is what this site uses, along with a file loader (aka FTP program). You can sign up for bluehost here for about $100 a year and $65 of your initial fee will go to support this website.

Be prepared to learn what a video container and what a codec is. This is a long and complex topic. Suffice to say that the world of conversion utilities is fraught with perils of copyright violations on most of the major movie codecs and containers. Anyway, here are some tips for organizing a plan of action to produce an online video website.

  • 1. Assemble the raw footage and music accompaniment into a folder. You will need input sources from (1) video; (2) background audio; and possibly (3) microphone recordings of narration.
  • 2. Open a movie editor and put the basic movie together. The following movie elements will need to be integrated using separate processes.
    • 2.a. Titles (captions) can be created in a movie editor or if they are simple images, they can be produced in an image editor or by screen captures, or from a digital camera image.
    • 2.b. Background music. Unless you are recording your own compositions, save yourself a lot of trouble over copyright issues and buy several packages of royalty-free music from Amazon or wherever. Also install Audacity on your system to use as a sound file preprocessor. For mp3 editing you will need to download some codecs (aka compressor-decompressors), such as the lame MP3 sound encoder. No it isn't lame as in no good - that is the brand name.
    • 2.c. Narration. If your video editor provides this function, then that is the way to go. Some sound cards won't let you play and record at the same time so that is a problem to ponder. You may need to use an external player or recorder to do both at once. A quick and dirty external recording solution is to just use a video cam recorder and just discard the pictures. For real quick and dirty work, you can also manually pan in sound from a boom-box, although the quality will be better if done from the video editor.
  • 3. When complete, export the video. If using Microsoft Movie Maker this will be in WMV format, which might be a little on the large size for convenient uploading. Youtube limits uploads to 15MB and 10 minutes.
  • 4. Depending on the size of the output file and whether you have slow or medium internet speeds, you may need to resize your videos to be less than say, 10 MB. In that case you will need a conversion utility such as handbrake. This utility also allows you to change the format of the video container. When resized and recontainerized, you are now ready to upload your files. Remember that Youtube will compress and alter your video even further, so to keep the final quality as high as possible, avoid conversions and use the less compressed file formats.
  • 6. If you would rather load your videos to your own website then you should try the JW Player for Flash and HTML5 on the Web, by Longtail Video.