MVP Summit Movie

I have finally finished the movie of my pictures from the MVP summit in Seattle in March. I thought that some of you might like to see the movie, as well as hear a little about how I created it.  

I am an avid picture taker. In the days before digital cameras, I wore out two Minolta X-700 camera bodies. There have been times in my life where I thought nothing of taking 5 or 6 rolls of 36 or more pictures each in a single day. When digital cameras came out, I jumped from film to media.

Now, I shoot with either a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX9 or a Lumix DMC-FX3, depending on which I have handier. (The FX-3 stays in my purse almost all the time.) The pictures used in the movie were all taken with the FX-3.

I am a lazy photographer. I would rather let the camera do most of the work and just shoot. I do tend to take pictures in both portrait and landscape modes, as you will see in the video. Once I have the pictures on the computer, I sort them by day they were taken and figure out what needs to be done to make them right. In most of these, I needed to turn them or remove red-eye. Both of these functions were done with Vista’s version of Window Photo Gallery.

Once the pictures were fixed, I opened Camtasia Studio 4 to generate the movie. First, I created and named the title “slides”. Next, I pulled in the pictures one day at a time. For each day, I picked the pictures that were the best shots of MVPs.

I took over 200 pictures, not all of which made it into the video. Oh, I took a couple of short videos with the camera too. But, since the people in the videos have asked nice (Sandy H), I have decided not to post them…. Or at least not at this time.

As I brought the pictures into Camtasia Studio’s Clip Bin, I moved them to the timeline between the appropriate titles. Once the pictures were there, I added the sound track. The biggest part of the sound track is Mike Tholfsen’s My One and Only OneNote. Once that ends, the rest of the sound track is two pieces of royalty free music I found on the web.

Once all the pieces were together, I produced the video for web browsing. For the most part, I took the default settings in Camtasia Studio. When the video was done rendering and verified, I used Camtasia Studio’s built-in function to upload the Flash and associate files directly to TechSmith’s www.ScreenCast.com. I do have to admit one problem with this process… I didn’t notice that I had a typo in the marker name for Wednesday, so that marker is named Wednesay instead of Wednesday. Other than that, I am very happy with the result. If you want to see it, feel free to check it out here. If you want the link, I have created a Tiny URL for it as well: http://tinyurl.com/ytcm57

Check it out and let me know what you think. I will be posting more videos/screencasts over the next few days, as I have several done but no blog entry written about them as of yet. Watch for them here!
 

[tags]Camtasia Studio, video, Flash, MVP Summit, TechSmith, Lumix, Panasonic, Seattle{/tags]