It’s not a full examination of every technical aspect of RAW vs. JPEG, but I show some of the reasons why I try to shoot RAW almost all the time, as well as some reasons why I sometimes shoot in JPEG instead. Some of the subtle differences didn’t really translate into the compressed video files, but hopefully you can get an idea of what the extra data in a RAW file is handy for.

Episode 003: 10:43 duration, 320×240 11.4MB or HD 15.2MB

Time for another episode, this time on basic workflow - importing a few photos, deleting the crap, and processing the one(s) that don’t get nuked. This time, the dogs were quiet, and The Boy™ decided not to make an appearance. I might schedule him for a later episode…

Episode 2: Basic Workflow weighs in at 12.1 MB, and clocks in at 10:27. Or, if you want a full HD version, use the second link.

Episode 2 (1080×675, 14.6MB)

I’m going to try producing a series of presentations in various media to document and share some of the tricks I’ve learned in my playing with digital photography. There are lots of other resources out there, so I’m not going to try to be canonical or exhaustive, but will try to answer some of the questions that people ask me.

This first episode is mostly just an intro/warmup for me, and I picked a basic topic: project and album management in Aperture 2.

Episode 1: Aperture 2 Project and Album Management weighs in at 10.20 MB, and clocks in at 8:24.

Episode 1 (1080×675, 14.2MB)

I just recorded a (very) quick and dirty screencast to demo the EduGlu sandbox prototype that was put together in Drupal. It’s a 23 minute session, and clocks in at 28 MB. I probably rambled a bit more than I should have, but you’ll get the idea…

(The Anarchy Media Player displays a smallish video embedded on this post, but you can download the video to view at 640×480 if you want to try to read the tiny text in the screencast)

EduGlu Screencast

Download EduGlu Screencast

I’m preparing a series of screencasts as part of the session at the Open Education 2007 Conference (with my co-conspirator, Rev. Jim Groom). We’re doing a two-fold presentation.

1. Creation of an open education resource on early American history.
2. Documentation of  the processes used to build said resource, using freely available applications and services.

We gave ourselves a very simple constraint. Use only tools that don’t require access to a server, and don’t require any money. The idea being that we would be able to come up with a process that didn’t require a great deal of technical skillz, and wouldn’t require a budget to implement.

So, as part of the Documentation of Processes effort, I did a basic screencast to introduce the 3 people on the planet who don’t use WordPress to the WordPress.com interface - how to create a blog, how to create content, etc…

The screencast looks pretty darned good in the original QuickTime H.264 file. Glorious, even. I can read the scaled-down text on the web page. Exactly what I need.

But, WordPress.com won’t let me embed a .mov file, as it dutifully strips out the object/embed element if I add it. Doh. OK. Plan B. I’ll chuck it up to DivShare.com. Oh, wait. There’s still the object/embed problem, because DivShare doesn’t have a “Post to WordPress” button (it does allow posting to Facebook and del.icio.us, though…)

Plan C. Google Video. Transcoding to Flash Video. It worked, but man does Google Video (or probably more appropriately does Flash Video) ever suck the shiny out of a video. It looks like it was downsized to 320×240 and then upsized for display. Remember the video in the original Quake? Or maybe Doom? Yeah. It’s like that. Big blocky pixels. Muddy. Blurry.

But, WordPress.com will let me embed it, so that’s the version of the file that I’ll use.

The original, QuickTime video encoded in standard H.264: (original file: 10.34 MB .mov)

The fracktastic, muddy, blurry mess that got spewed out of Google Video: (transcoded file: 17.1 MB .flv)

I could live with the dramatic drop in size and quality, if the file were dramatically smaller. But it’s almost 70% BIGGER than the original file! WTF? Oh, well. At least it’s embeddable…

I’ve been using eXe for some project work lately, and thought it might be handy to do a quick and dirty screencast of what it’s like to author content using eXe. It’s an open source, cross platform website authoring tool that uses some of the same patterns that Pachyderm does - structured content with pedagogical templates. Except it generates plain vanilla html (and SCORM, and IMS CP, etc…)

The screencast is just over 19 minutes (sorry for going on so long) and weighs in as a 27MB file.

Sounds like I left the microphone level too low. Oops. Might have to crank up the volume if you want to hear me. Next screencast, I’ll make sure to properly adjust mic levels first…

Update: I published the lame ePortfolio demo as a static website to show what the output looks like.�

I promised to do a quick screencast showing what we demoed to one of our Geology profs for using Google Earth to help teach geology (specifically, plate tectonics). Here's a really quick runthrough, using some of the awesome Google Earth add-on layers provided by the San Diego State University College of Sciences.

I should warn, though, that since I am not a geologist (I don't even play one on TV) and since it's first thing in the morning, I do get some stuff mixed up. Just cringe, push through it, and look at the bigger picture - an interactive 3D geology simulation powered by Google Earth and freely available information.

The video is available in small H.264 format,which will work fine in iTunes and on iPods. It's also available in original large H.264 format and MPEG4.

I recorded my morning RSS checkin with BlogBridge 4.1 (well, I recorded it with iShowU, but the checkin was done using BlogBridge). The power of the feed star rating feature is really hard to describe - it’s much easier to just show it.

I wound up with a 16 minute recording, which is about how long it takes for me to check in on 443 feeds first thing in the morning. I took some time to describe the BlogBridge interface, but skimmed slightly more than usual so it probably worked out about the same duration.

I skipped reading many posts in detail, because that would make for an even more boring recording. The BlogBridge application was running on my second display, with the browser running on my main display - I switched regions for recording near the end (you can tell when).

Oh, and don’t read too much into the star ratings. I can’t rate every feed as being 5-stars, otherwise the ratings become rather useless. There are a lot of great feeds that I subscribe to but have left them unrated (or under-rated). That’s OK. My 5-star feeds of trusted people help me filter everything so I don’t miss anything.