#39 Animoto - make video clips like pros!

Animoto is absolutely cool! After my lack of skill and enthusiasm about the comic relief topic, it was great to get into Animoto and let them create a professional video for me. I continued on the theme of Agatha Christie and Egypt that I started in Photobucket a number of things ago and also carried on with in Scrapblog. Animoto was easy to join up to.

The first glitch came when loading from Photobucket was not available as an option, even though it was listed as one and they had apparently promised that it was coming in September 2007. But as I had loaded some of the Agatha Christie and Egypt photos onto my hard drive, I loaded them from there. That was pretty straightforward though it took a bit of time. I could then spotlight photos I wanted highlighted and reorder them or delete them. Then I needed to choose music. I could have uploaded some from elsewhere but chose to use some of theirs. The range was not great - Electronica,Indie rock, hip hop, Latin and Singer/songwriter - and none of it probably suited my archaeology and sleuth theme.

Animoto then analyzes the images and the music and pieces it together into a video clip. It took a while for this process to happen, but they warned you and offered some entertainment. Once the video clip is produced you can then remix it or tweak it yourself. I was happy and easily uploaded it here to my blog and also onto the Boroondara Learning 2.1 ning. You can do 30 seconds clips for free and these take about 10-15 photographs, or you can join up and pay for longer videos.



I was so excited I decided to start another one based on some photographs of Polyxena and Hecuba. Those photographs are higher resolution and took quite a time to load. I also remixed them and changed the photos. It all takes time but it is fine. Some of them turned out quite grainy in the application and I'm not sure why. With this one, I also uploaded it to the blog (see next post), to the Boroondara Learning 2.1 ning and also to Facebook. It all worked fine, though I am now wondering about the automatic start here on the blog as both want to start in conflict. Sigh! The challenges of technology.

#36 Dressing up your photos

Xmas Xena
Originally uploaded by Hecuba's Story

This task is looking at sites which will allow you to play around with photos - crop, resize, recolour, fix red eye and add features. We were given a couple of options Picnik, Fauxto now called Splashup, Pixenate and Snapfish as well as some other less well-known ones.

I chose to sign up with Picnik and found it very easy to use, though I did keep on getting tantalized by the Premium components which I would have for US$24.95 a year. You can upload photos from your computer, do web searches or link to various sites. I easily linked to my Flickr, Photobucket and Facebook accounts but ended up loading a couple of very familiar photos from my PC - they are the ones featured in this blog for Polyxena and Hecuba.

I played around with colour options (B/W, sepia etc), adding text and stickers and borders, and cropping and resizing. In both cases I added the vignette tool to highlist the cat, though this is not quite so clear with the Xmas trappings added. Then I saved my photos. Initially I thought I could only save back to the source where I had uploaded, but with the second one I discovered that by clicking on the Flickr tab I could easily save to Flickr.

I don't know what the other tools are like, but this is a great one. I can see great use for it both for staff who don't have access to Photoshop and also for use on public PCs.

#29 Scrapblog - I'm in love?

Well, I am not totally in love with this as I seemed to have all sorts of problems with Scrapblog. Firstly, and I have no one else to blame for this I didn't do the quick tour and was a bit mystified about stuff. I didn't find help very useful as I appeared to have had to register first, and I only found the FAQ after I had resolved my confusion. I also hadn't obeyed instructions in #27 and had saved a bunch of photos about Egypt with Agatha Christie in mind but no Agatha Christie. Sooo, I had to go back and save a few more.

Then once I had chosen a template and wanted to upload photos from Photobucket, the link wasn't working and I was told to try again later - several times. I don't know where the problem lay but I copied the photos I needed to my hard drive and uploaded them successfully from there. Then I was ready and I published! This was taking quite a while and I left the room. Mistake! When I came back, Scrapblog was back at the home page. Gulp! Had I lost it all?

I logged in and found my Agatha Christie Scrapblog but do you think I could work out how to share it with Flickr? The FAQ which I had discovered by that time said to go to the "share" option up the top, but that was only there in the creation section. I assume that once a Scrapblog is published you don't get another option to share. I gave up at this point and was closing down Scrapblog when I discovered another page open. That page was the end of the publishing process and gave me the option to share with Flickr. Phew!! It had been sitting there all along. Duh! Anyway, my Agatha Christie scrapblog is now saved on Flickr. I am sure it will be easier next time ;>), but I do worry about the slowness particularly if we are wanting to use it at work.

#27 Photobucket

I hadn't used Photobucket before so I was keen to give it a go. I signed up fairly easily (except that there is another Polyxena who had taken my name). Then I got a bit waylaid by playing around with atavars and dressing and redressing them. Are atavars the 21st century version of the cutout dolls of my youth, I wondered?

After playing with the avatar palled, I created an album of photographs about Egypt and loaded up a link to my blog. I did the same with a slideshow I created, and was really impressed by the ease of creating the slideshow and the number of possible formats. Again like with my widgets the sizing does not look perfect and I am not sure how to change it.

One of the things that I like about Flickr is the ability to add favourites and make friends and send messages. If this is possible in Photobucket, it passed me by. I also found the ads very, very intrusive. And then there is the copyright issue. Flickr has made a very clear stand on this with Creative Commons, but with Photobucket it seems to be open slather. I think that I will be staying with Flickr for the present but like many things that I have touched on in Learning 2.0 and Learning 2.1 I know that my knowledge of Photobucket is fairly superficial at this stage.