There are simple video-editing apps, and then there’s Fly, a new iPhone app that lets you edit a short movie inside literally one screen. Fly works by importing four of your videos into the app’s editor, and then letting you tap on each one to make live cuts and switch between clips instantly. You can add a voice over or background music from your device, and then export your video to post on Instagram or elsewhere. If you’re looking to make something a little more adventurous, Fly also includes “Multi-Cam,” a feature that lets you sync up to four iPhones to all shoot and capture video simultaneously.
The folk over at America’s Test Kitchen, seen both on broadcast television, the web and YouTube, are a dedicated lot. They test foods, methods, products again…and again…and again…and again in order to come to the best conclusions, cooking methods, product reviews and more. I recently watched a segment on the best zip-top bags and found it immensely useful. I would never have the patience or time to do their exhaustive testing and thank them greatly for doing it for me…and all their viewers. There is a wide variety of info on their YouTube Channel and their web site including recipes, equipment reviews, taste tests and more! Check them out today!
From the America’s Test Kitchen YouTube Channel…
America’s Test Kitchen is a real 2,500 square foot test kitchen located just outside of Boston that is home to more than three dozen full-time cooks and product testers. Our mission is simple: to develop the absolute best recipes for all of your favorite foods. To do this, we test each recipe 30, 40, sometimes as many as 70 times, until we arrive at the combination of ingredients, technique, temperature, cooking time, and equipment that yields the best, most-foolproof recipe.
Subscribed is a Careers in New Media series highlighting the Podcasts, YouTube Channels and Blogs that I follow on a daily basis. Check out this entry, and past entries, for some great New Media Content — Douglas
I’d forgotten all about my childhood dreams of achieving world domination using my very own robot army until I switched on the TB3 from eMotimo. As soon as I synched up the wireless remote and started panning and tilting this robotic tripod head, I was transformed into a grinning 8 year old boy who believed he could do anything.
I expect that the eMotimo exhibit at trade shows is usually ringed by a troupe of grinning time-lapse photography nerds like myself, who just realized they stumbled upon a truly legendary tool for photographic creativity.
Blogging is at its very heart, a web site, like every other web site. Google’s a web site. My web site’s a web site. You web site’s a web site. A blog is just simply one way of presenting a web site. It is a web site, but easier. That’s what I try to tell people everyone about it. The fact is, with a blog — I often describe a blog as being like a piece of boilerplate letterhead. Where, you know, you have the company name, your logo, the address, all printed, then you print on that letterhead.
A blog is very similar, but for your web site. It’s designed on a template. Its designed on all your typical information is around the outside frame and the, if you want to put something new up — you want to put new content up — you want to announce a new press release, you want to have some new piece of information there, you can easily go to one page, much like a word processor, you type or cut and paste into that site what you want, hit publish and it’s on your web site.
YouTube may face some challenges as it moves toward the mainstream, but it isn’t standing still on the technological side. Here are eight new tools for video creators YouTube execs Matthew Glotzbach and Oliver Heckmann—the site’s director of product management and VP of engineering, respectively—previewed at the unofficial YouTube convention VidCon last week.
A few are available now, but most are are still coming attractions. Keep your eyes peeled, YouTubers.
YouTube is about to get a whole lot better, with a slew of new features freshly announced at this year’s VidCon. Google’s video wing will soon get support for clips running at 48-and-60 frames-per-second, which should be perfect for video game footage that you’ve captured an uploaded from your PlayStation 4 or Xbox One in addition to those 1080p60 game trailers that are quickly becoming the norm. You’ll have to make sure 1080p resolution is selected to get the benefit of the higher frame-rate, naturally, and we’ve embedded a sample after the break. Customizable and, as the YouTube Creators blog post tells it, prettier-looking annotation cards as well as some new tools that your fans can use are en route, too. What are those? Well, viewers will soon be able to drop you a few bucks here and there so you don’t have to rely on ad revenue alone.
It was a great talk, but something else struck me as even more important. NTMA, Richard and Brad took great pains to stream the talk and record it for future viewing. This was a perfect example of what we should all be doing when organize, host or create great content. We had about 40 people in the room with us today, but there is a potential audience of thousands on the Internet, where this video can live on forever. Why would you NOT capture such great content? Every time I see that happen I consider it such a great waste of information and also a waste of the presenters and organizers time. It may be a one time event, but video can continue to work towards your goals 24/7 for the foreseeable future.
Brad recording and streaming today’s robotics presentation
You don’t have to go all out, like the NTMA folks did today. I counted at least 4 video cameras as well as the live stream and a high quality audio recording. If you have nothing else, use your iPhone, your iPad, your Android tablet whatever you have at hand. If you are doing video, find a way to prop up the device, so the video is as smooth as possible. For me, though, capturing the content is far more important than professional quality video. Yes, make it as easy to watch and hear as possible, but first, capture it!
For myself, I have a variety of ways of capturing content when I am out and about. I have my iPhone, of course, Rosanne’s iPad, an HD camcorder with external mice and a tripod, a still camera that also takes video, Joseph’s iPhone and even an ancient iRiver IFP audio recorder that I can press into service, if needed. I am sure you have plenty of devices in your own kit that could also be used — if you only took the time to do it.
If you are hosting an event, record it so you can share it on your own web site and social media channels and also offer it up to your speaker for their own usage. If you are speaking or presenting, always come prepared to record yourself so that you gave content to use later. In many cases, you can offer this back to your organizer so they have something to share, even if they didn’t think of recording it themselves. Set a good example and capture everything you do. Encourage others to do it, too. I know there is a lot of content I would have liked to see, if only the speaker, the musician, the presenter, the performer would have taken the time to capture it.
You can join NTMA for future robotics Meetup by joining their Meetup group at the SoCal Combat Robotics Meetup site.
I have used iPod and iPhone connected microphones before, so when I saw the Zoom iQ5 mentioned in MacLife magazine, I thought I would do a little more research into it. I hadn’t paid much attention when it was first released, as I didn’t have the iPhone necessary to use it. With the release of new iPhones this year, though, I will probably be upgrading.
Any quality device that can help reduce the amount of “stuff” you have to carry around is always worth look — and listen. Reviews on Amazon are good overall, although some list alternatives that they preferred. If I was doing a lot of field work, or finding myself grabbing interviews on the fly, I might consider something like this, although I need to upgrade my iPhone first as this requires the new Lightning connector.
You can find out more about the Zoom iQ5 using these links:
I have made something similar by rubber banding the wind guard from my Zoom H2 over the built-in mic on my camcorder, so I know it is possible for something like this to work. Wind can still get under the guard unless you hold it just right and that could be an issue here, too. When it does work, though, it works really well, cutting out the wind noise even on a moving power boat. — Douglas
I use a small camera (Cisco Flip) to take video. It’s great for what I do, except small amounts of wind cause a lot of noise.
That’s where Micromuff helps. You have a small Velcro patch that glues to your camera, and a wind muff that attaches to the Velcro. I’ve been using MicroMuff Original for about six months, and it’s brilliant. I can hear people talking, not wind blowing.
One of the challenges of hosting your own site and using WordPress is security. As WP has gotten more and more popular, it has become a huge target for hackers of all sorts. I’ve had my own fair share of old installations getting hacked and causing problems for live sites, rogue files, brute force login attempts that create a denial of service, DOS attacks against XMLRPC, and so on over the years.
Recently, I came across a mention of a security plugin called Wordfence and decided to try it out. It scans your install for any changes made to the WordPress core, theme and plugin files by comparing them to the original from the WordPress codex.
Our web sites are arid fields of old information, in most cases and the reason is — it’s not your fault — it really isn’t. It’s technology’s fault. It’s people like me who can’t write — or couldn’t write — systems that allowed you update your web sites easily.
If you have to bring up Dreamweaver. If you have to bring up a web site editor program to edit your web site, guess what? You will never update your web site. (indistinct audience comment) If you have to bring up a huge program and actually edit static pages, you’re probably not going to update your web site. Simply because it is too difficult for your average person.
IFTTT is one of our favorite tools (and one that I’d imagine you might love as well). We use IFTTT in a number of neat ways here at Buffer, and there are loads of different options available through IFTTT for powering up your social media marketing. I thought I’d share a few of our favorites and some that might help you work smarter, too.
There’s a lot going on out in the world. If you blink, you might miss it. That’s why the iStabilizer is so great. It helps you see everything that happens, capturing occurrences from all degrees and angles like your own personal extra set of eyes. To get shots that you could only imagine otherwise, you need the iStabilizer–and you can get it on sale right now from the iPhone Hacks Deals Hub.
After 12 plus years of blogging, I’m sure that you can imagine that there must be a lot of links that I’ve shared that may not actually go anywhere any longer. That is true, but I never really knew how true until I grabbed a copy of the WordPress plugin Broken Link Checker.
I installed it over on my child abuse survivor blog, and out of curiosity I went ahead and let it do it’s things.
Sure enough, it found a few hundred broken links and presented them all to me in a list, like you see below.
I only recently subscribed to Gardenista, after seeing some of their articles in other blogs and sites. I have especially loved their “Garden Visit” series which takes you lovely photographic tours of gardens all over the world — most of which I have never heard of before.
The site also posts writing on food, garden DIY projects, design and more.
Subscribed is a Careers in New Media series highlighting the Podcasts, YouTube Channels and Blogs that I follow on a daily basis. Check out this entry, and past entries, for some great New Media Content — Douglas
You need to capture ideas as they occur to you, because we tend to throw away lots of content every day. We simply have a great idea on our walk or in the shower, whatever, and don’t capture it and it’s gone. It’s very rare that you get those ideas back unless there’s similar stimulus to trigger them again. Most times, they just kind of go down the river of thought and you never think about them again.
Integrate it into your life. Think about those questions that come into your life that you’re answering for other people. Think about the opinions that you’re being asked for at a party, at a dinner, by friends, by family. What are your opinions? Maybe that’s worth sharing in your podcast, if it’s on the topic of your podcast. Read the news. Read your RSS feeds. Read blogs. Check out stuff on the Internet. Set up Google News Alerts to trigger you with — to send you email when there’s a new news items on your topic. I’ll think you’ll be surprised how much content is really out there and how much information is available to you to draw upon to use in your own shows.
We have so many tools at our fingertips today that simply weren’t available 10 years ago. It’s easy to go out and shoot a video — of very high quality. It’s easy to go out and record audio of very high quality. We carry a little movie studio — for the most part — a little audio studio, in our pockets these days, along with a camera, a video camera, and a ton of other tools. There’s really no reason for you not to be marketing yourself every single day because the tools are there. The tools are no longer your limitation. It still tends to be our own limitations about marketing that hold us back.
One of things I recommend to people, too, is to get good at grabbing the content that you already create. If I’m at a museum and I’m visiting and looking around the collection, I’ll take photos. I’ll take some video. I’ll maybe do some audio. I’m going to be there anyway. I’m going to be engaging in activity anyway. It’s not like I made a special trip out there or anything like that. I’m already there doing the event. Why wouldn’t I capture some of the content from that event to later share on my blog, on my podcast, whatever? I see a lot of people who don’t do that. They go off and do some very cool things, but then they don’t capture anything to share with their friends, their family, and their audience, later.
U.S., Canada, China, France, Hong Kong, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, and the U.K. in the months of July and August. Enrollment is free, and parents can sign up at AppleRSVP.com as registration opens in their region.
In the “Stories in Motion with iMovie” camp, Apple will teach young learners how to create movies on their Mac using Final Cut’s little brother. Apple says the curriculum will include storyboarding, filming, creating a soundtrack using the iPad’s unique version of GarageBand, and finally bringing the final edit together on a Mac.
The Mozart Project ($14.99) is a book about the life and music of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Or is it an app? Stephen Fry calls it “a completely new kind of book”…you read it in iBooks but it acts more like an app than anything. Over 200 pages of text by leading Mozart scholars is accompanied by hours of music, videos, photo slideshows, all sorts of other goodies.
Xavier de le Rue is founder of Palo Alto-based Squadrone System and an action sports filmmaker, and his company is currently raising money on Kickstarter for the HEXO+, a drone designed to autonomously follow you with a video camera for the sake of getting great (and otherwise expensive) aerial footage for your video projects.
The project was born out of necessity, and it’s already crushed fundraising goals, raising over six times its $50,000 goal — he and his crew “needed a solution that would make aerial filming possible in the most remote places: on mountains, in the snow, and in all sorts of unpredictable situations that were quite a pain to deal with when trying to sync a drone pilot, a cameraman and a rider.”
