I've prepared a short video summarising what we (the Eduserv Foundation) are doing on Eduserv Island. The main point of doing this was to have something suitable for streaming onto our stand at the Second Life Best Practices Conference. Note that I threw this together fairly hastily so don't expect anything too polished - but I think it gets the main points across.
With apologies to Jeremy Kemp, off of whom I nicked some ideas for the video!
As blogged here, all the streaming media and most of the Powerpoint presentations from the Eduserv Foundation Symposium 2007 are now available on the Web and in-world. Enjoy!
There were 6 presentations, so we have 6 files of mp4 streaming media. I wasn't sure how best to handle this in-world? A single screen with scripting to switch between the different presentations? 6 different screens, one per presentation?
In the end I opted for the latter, on the basis that there might be contention issues over a single screen. I've therefore created six small land parcels alongside the Virtual Congress Centre, attaching one of the streaming files to each.
I've just uploaded my first video to YouTube. Nothing very exciting I'm afraid, just an explanation of how to see and hear streaming media. The soundtrack is also rather bizarre, but I felt it needed something to cover up my voice(!) and this was the first public domain MP3 track I found.
You'll also note that YouTube uses the opening frame as the static shot of the video. In this case, the opening frame is blank... so in future I need to work on getting a sensible opening shot to make the video content more obvious to potential viewers. Also, my laptop tends to create videos in wide screen format by default, which then get squished in 4:3 aspect ratio at some point in the uploading to YouTube process.
Still, it was fun to put together. For those with a technical interest, I captured the video using FRAPS, the soundtrack using Audacity and edited it all together using Windows Movie Maker.
