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Interactive Video BIG Grant Project Blog

Creating Online Lab Materials: Dan Greenwood & John Magliacane

About the BLOG
Here's our experiences working on the Interactive Video Development: ELEC 103 project. You'll read what obstacles we faced, planning and what worked well or didn’t. View our blog entries by category by clicking here.

If you have any comments, please email me at dgreenwood@brookdalecc.edu.    

Making Your Own Interactive Videos

One portion of our project was to document the process and make any recommendations on creating this type of content for anyone who might be interested in doing something similar. This BLOG has been used as a means to track our progress, note what worked, what didn’t, etc. and should provide some guidance if you are interested in doing a video project.

For this entry I wanted to summarize the basics of the project and share what we learned along the way.

Resources

Software

Below are the packages I used for production. You can find alternatives for some of them. Since I have a lot of experience with other Adobe products, I tended to use them on this project.

 Here’s a link to a previous entry with more software details: http://ux.brookdalecc.edu/fac/tlc/fac/blogs/video-big/blog_post.php?id=11

Adobe Premiere Elements – video editing application
Adobe Audition 2.0 – Audio editing application
Adobe Captivate 3.0 – Application used to produce final videos. Use to integrate of video, graphics and exercises. It produces a Flash (SWF) file which can be played back in any browser for easy delivery. It allows you to layout the project as slides for each segment.
Adobe PhotoShop CS2 – Still image and photograph editing
ANGEL – LMS to deliver the videos and runs surveys

Equipment

Sony HANDYCAM – DVD mini – Video recording
Camera Tripod
Canon PowerShot Digital Camera – still photos
Sony Viao Laptop PC – 1 GB RAM, 2 GH Pentium 4 processor

Talent

John - Video planning, write scripts, lab setup, review, narration
Dan - Video planning, editing, production, deployment, narration
Joe (student) – Narration

Project Planning

The more planning and adhering to a plan the better off you will be.  Here are our recommended planning stages for this type of project:

1. Develop goals and key information you want to share with your videos.

2. Evaluate what software and equipment resources you may need and plan on getting them pulled together.

3. Make an outline or storyboard your each video segment including ideas on what video captures you’ll need, still images, audio resources, etc. Try not to have very long video segments. If you are delivering your content online it is better to break the video segments into “chunks” which will download faster and are easier for you to edit and produce.

4. Use your storyboard to drive the creation of a narrative script for each video segment.

5. Record your audio for video segments. It’s best to record the audio into separate files for each paragraph. You can always split or append audio segments as needed during editing.

6. Using your storyboard and the audio recordings, recording your video. Make sure to get more footage from different angles. It’s good to have some extra video to handle oversights in planning.

7. Start editing the raw video into more refined clips to match your storyboards. Video files are large so you are less likely to run into computer issues if you can break them up into smaller files. At this stage you can “drop” any garbage video you have. Just save the original video file in case you need to get something back.

8. Once you have your video and audio broken up into smaller segments you can start pulling them together in the video application. Here you can combine a series of short segments together into a single topic.

9. Produce a single video “chunk” as Flash Video ( FLV is best file for online video content)

10. Use Captivate to pull in video segments onto project slides. You can also add text, still graphics and exercise questions using this application.

11. Produce the Captivate project as a Flash element.

12. Upload the Flash element into ANGEL for delivery. ANGEL can also be used to delivery a survey.

Lessons Learned …

Admittedly we didn’t follow our own plan as well as we should have. Them main item was we didn’t get the script done before jumping into video recording. This was due to my eagerness to start using the video equipment and to learn how to use the software for the video work.

We also learned that it is best to reserve the use of video segments for content that needs to show actual movement or actions.  If you can get the same information across with still graphics and a little animation using Captivate, you reduce the time needed for video editing and also make the project more web friendly.

Working with video for the first time is a slow process; Plan on it taking more time than you have anticipated, especially when editing for the first few times.

From our survey results, we found student wanted to have reinforcement exercises within the videos.  Consider adding simple multiple-choice or other question formats in between video concepts. This also improves the interaction and engages the student.

We found it important to break the Oscilloscope into four video elements since the amount of material covered a varying range of topics. An added benefit of this if a student needs a refresher on a specific topic they don’t need to watch the other content such as the Introduction.

Video editing takes a lot of CPU power and RAM to work. We’d recommend you having at least 1 GB of RAM and a CPU of 2 GHz or higher when trying to work on video.  The video files themselves also need a lot of disk space so make sure you have a few GB available on your drive.

We found out that the NJ Community Colleges negotiated excellent pricing with Adobe. To get this pricing you need to use what is known as a CLP number when the order is made. The savings are substantial.  When we bought our initial software we were not aware of this. As a result of having this lower pricing though, we had enough money to replace Captivate 2 to Captivate 3 at less than half the original price. If you have questions about this pricing please contact me. The agreement isn’t indefinite. It expires in 2009 but hopefully it will be renewed.

 
Last Thoughts …

This was a fun (and challenging) project. Our initial survey results are very positive and other members of the Department have asked to use our videos already. 

We feel this type of project could be of benefit in a wide variety of disciplines.

Thanks to everyone involved in the project and to the Grants office for giving us the opportunity to work on our Interactive Videos.

Permalink: http://www.brookdalecc.edu/fac/tlc/fac/blogs/video-big/blog_post.php?id=13

Lessons Learned

While this project has given me the opportunity to pick up a lot of new skills such as video editing, using Captivate, etc., I must admit that the most important thing I picked up has to do the topic of planning.

I like to think I am a good project planner, and I feel I am pretty good at following up on project planning milestones but I m the first to admit that I broke some fundamental planning rules on this project.
 
The most egregious example is not getting the narration script developed before capturing the video segments.  I and John brainstormed on the tutorials but I think in my eagerness and anticipation of doing the video work I let us jump too far ahead.

 John and I started the video capture by just talking through what we felt was the key segments that we wanted to record. However when we decided to use a student to record the narration tracks, we were met with the need for a formal script.  John did an excellent job on developing this script but we had already recorded most of the video we were not able to match the audio recording process with the visual aspect of the project. In other words we didn’t always have the video to match the final narration script.

 So in hind sight, we should have gotten the script finalized before we started the video capture process.

 Since I didn’t anticipate this issue, I found myself trying to edit the video and audio piecemeal.  If I was missing video for a particular section of text, I scrambled to get the visual elements I needed.

 While this was not trivial, I must admit the situation encouraged me to come up with suitable alternatives to video clips. I found out that by using still graphics and animation you could replace the need for some video content. When looking at file size issues and online delivery I feel we stumbled into a valuable lesson: Use video when you need to show actions – still graphics however work well in many cases. Thus I learned to tailor the educational material to the best suited technology

 When working on a project of this type, I think you are better off NOT limiting yourself to a single media type. You have to look at the information you want to share and THEN decide on the best platforms.

 
Survey Results and Our Next Step

With more than 50% survey respondent results, I think we were able to get some valuable information.

 One comment that was mentioned more than once suggested slowing down the pace of the tutorial examples.  For the Spring term, I plan to use the exiting tutorials and run the surveys again. If the response is the same I will modify the playback timing.

As far as time and effort, editing video can be a VERY time intensive process. You need to watch and re-watch video segments. You mark down which section you want to use and then start editing the clips together. It takes time and patience. There is a lot of repetition and rework that is required.

 
We will run the surveys in the Spring ‘08 term to see if we get any other useful comments that we can address.

Permalink: http://www.brookdalecc.edu/fac/tlc/fac/blogs/video-big/blog_post.php?id=12

Software, and Equipment, and PC’s … oh my …

For this post I wanted to share my experiences with specific non-human assets we used on this project.  Let’s start with the software packages used on the project.

There are three main software applications that were used. They each cover three separate areas: video editing, audio editing and interaction/integration.

 VIDEO/IMAGE EDITING

As mentioned in a previous BLOG entry, I’ve used Adobe Premiere Elements 3 for editing video content. At the TLC I have also used Adobe Premiere Pro 2. I found that the less complex and costly package, Premiere Elements 3 was far more intuitive and flexible.  Both packages require some getting used to; you need to look at things in terms of time for example. I found removing audio from the original video recording easy. Likewise, it was easy to ass new narration audio tracks to the videos in Premier Elements 3 easy.   One point to note is that since our purpose was for web-delivered video, I found if necessary to use Premiere Elements to save the composite video clips as AVI and then convert them into Flash Video using the Flash video encoder.  This encoder was something I has on my home PC since I used Flash Profession 8.  It was not part of our grant.

As the project moved forward I found it necessary to use many still image graphics such as digital photographs and illustrations.  I used Adobe PhotoShop to edit and manipulate these graphics so that they could be incorporated into the project.

AUDIO EDITING

I used Adobe Audition 2 for editing the narration tracks before importing them into the video tracks. The application has a great graphical interface which was easy to use. It is fairly intuitive for someone who has used an audio editor program such as Cool Edit or Audacity.  What I learned during the audio edit process is that less is more: don’t try and make things sound perfect since that rarely sounds natural.

PULLING IT ALL TOGETHER

After some initial research, I asked that the TLC purchase a few programs for evaluation. One of these programs was Adobe Captivate.  I ended up using this on twp projects for the TLC already when we got the BOG grant so I knew it was a great fit for this project.  Captivate allows you to incorporate graphics, audio, video clips, animation and quiz/exercise into a single project.   It was a perfect fit

For our project so we put it on our list of software applications.  It has an intuitive interface and allows you to leverage some built in functions such as text animation.

Using Captivate I could divide a tutorial into segments. At the end of a segment I could add an exercise to reinforce the concepts presented in the section.

While I know how to do animation with Flash, Captivate has many built in features that let a non programmer do many interesting effects. For me, it was a tool that let me concentrate less on animation and more on video editing.

 
ANGEL

I used our LMS, ANGEL, to deliver the tutorials and collect the survey results.

The video recorder that the TRL had worked well. As you may have read in a previous post the mini-DVD format was a mixed blessing. It alleviated the need for cables and transfer video to a computer but was not as transparent as I had anticipated. Luckily, Adobe Premiere Elements was more flexible than its big brother Premiere Pro 2.

LAB EQUIPMENT

John pulled together all of the needed lab equipment for the project. Oscilloscopes, Analog Multimeter’s, power supplies, function generators and his baby …

COMPUTER REQUIREMENTS

I did almost all of the work on this project using my Sony Viao K23 laptop which I purchased in 2004. Having said that I must tell you that I needed to double my machine’s RAM from 512 MB to 1 GB.  This was due to the memory hungry video editing process. You can get by with less but 1 GB makes things go much smoother.

To provide the other details on my PC:

• 2.8 GHz Pentium 4 CPU
• 60 GB hard drive
• External 19” Super VGA flat monitor

IN CONCLUSION

This type of video project requires non-standard applications and a machine to run them on effectively. And that is just the non-human element portion.

Permalink: http://www.brookdalecc.edu/fac/tlc/fac/blogs/video-big/blog_post.php?id=11

“Survey says …” (Part 2: Analog Multimeter survey results)

For this post we have the survey results for the Analog Multimeter Tutorials we created from the Fall 2007 session of ELEC 103.  We got more than a 50% response rate for this survey.

Since pictures are easier to interpret than words the following are bars graphs of the results; after which I have student comments.

In a later post I’ll provide our recommendations for revisions based on this and the Spring ’08 term survey results.

Note: Click any an  image below for a larger view.

Student Comments:

way to go guys  thanks  ohhh and ples tell 'desperation' that he did a good job Johnny Concepcion

Excellenet Tutorial. I wish this was put up when we started this course.

 The tutorial for the multimeter was helpful and me understand a little more about using it.

 Unable to open

 The tutorial overall wasn't fast but when showing examples of how to take individual readings it would switch to the next slide before I could read the meter myself.

 As far as I could tell the tutorial was fine the way  was and have no comments to add.

 It is very interesting to have an tutorial such as this. I have never had a class in which one of these was included. I like the use of technology in order for students to better understand the concepts.

Permalink: http://www.brookdalecc.edu/fac/tlc/fac/blogs/video-big/blog_post.php?id=10

“Survey says …” (Part 1: Oscilloscope Tutorial survey results)

In this post we have the survey results for the Oscilloscope Tutorials we created from the Fall 2007 session of ELEC 103.  We got more than a 50% response rate for this survey.

Since pictures are easier to interpret than words the following are bar graphs of the results; after which I have student comments.

In a later post I’ll provide our recommendations for revisions based on this and the Spring ’08 term survey results.

Note: Click any image below for a larger view.

Student Comments:

Very good guys and thank you for been so helpfull

These tutorials were very helpful and I now know how to measure signals on the oscilloscope.

The tutorials were useful to get an idea of what I would be working with. It is still very necessary for me to work hands-on with the material in order for me to understand completely.

Fast forwarding the video did not work well on my browser. It may be just my video player or my browser (Firefox)

If you slide the bar on the controls to the last slide and then try to go back and answer the questions, it tells you you'r not allowed to answer the questions. Only if you watch the previous few slides or restar the tutorial will it let you answer them.

Very Useful.

Permalink: http://www.brookdalecc.edu/fac/tlc/fac/blogs/video-big/blog_post.php?id=9

They’re back …

It took longer than planned but we have five tutorials that are ready and being used/reviewed by this term’s ELEC 103 students.

We were very fortunate that John found an ELEC student, Joe Pucciarelli, who we hired to do much of the narration. As a member of  a band, Joe had the equipment and was willing to help us out . He did an excellent and very professional job on the audio tracks he recorded.

I learned a lot about the process of working with video. I’ll share some of that in a future BLOG. We also have a survey in the class for the tutorials so I will share what we learned from them and how we might move forward.

For now though we want to show you what we came up with.  After many…many hours of work we have the following tutorials.

Just click on the respective image to launch a presentation.

Oscilloscope Tutorials

As for the BLOG, among the topics I plan to cover soon…

• What we learned about doing this type of project
• Our student survey results and any resulting plan for revisions
• Some advice on software and equipment
• Whatever else might come up with like new interfaces, etc.

 
We’ll be back soon!

 
Dan

Permalink: http://www.brookdalecc.edu/fac/tlc/fac/blogs/video-big/blog_post.php?id=8

Back on the road again ...

With summer vacations and the start of the Fall 07 term, I’ve been lax in posting information on our project. We have been moving forward – not as fast as I planned but this is all due to my availability and quite honestly energy.

We’ve recorded some narration and I’ve been pulling the pieces together.   As we record more vocals I see we are missing some visuals.

For now here’s what we have on the scope video.  This includes narration, video clips, a new background and a simple exercise for the student.

Click the image to launch  the presentation.

To get to this point I’ve used , Premier Elements 3 for video, Photoshop CS2 for image manipulation, Audition for processing the audio files, and Captivate 2 to  pull it all together including creating an exercise.

Stay tuned. To match the Fall term  lab schedule, we are working on the analog multimeter video next.

Permalink: http://www.brookdalecc.edu/fac/tlc/fac/blogs/video-big/blog_post.php?id=7

Adobe Premiere Elements 3: Our Chosen Video Application

This application is Adobe’s “consumer” product for video editing. Some of you might have compared Adobe PhotoShop Elements 4 versus PhotoShop CS3 for example.

The main interface is made of “panels” that have specific features that can be controlled.   Here is a screen shot of the full screen:

 

 

With new media in the application you can view panels such as the Monitor panel to review the video and set starting and ending points.

 

When it comes to laying out the video (i.e. what video segment follows another) you can view this by “scenes” or use a more detailed “timeline” view:

Once you have got the video sequence as you like, you export the video in the format that is most appropriate for your application. In our case we want something that can be delivered via the internet. Here’s an example of the Export window:

Permalink: http://www.brookdalecc.edu/fac/tlc/fac/blogs/video-big/blog_post.php?id=6

It may be a classic but … “It’s one small step …”

For this entry, I wanted to show you what we recently pulled together. Using our introduction storyboard as a guide, I started to put this video segment together. 

I started by using Premiere Elements to edit the raw video footage that John and I captured. These video files were very large and my first step was to cut these HUGE video segments into manageable pieces. I used Premiere Elements to create individual video files that I could more precisely edit to remove unwanted sections of the video.

Once I had the needed video segments, I went back to Captivate 2.0, the application I am using to pull all the pieces together,   and I added a “slide” for each section of this part of the project.  A slide is analogous to the same thing as a slide in PowerPoint. You can add text, pictures and other elements on each slide. As the final presentation moves forward, the viewer is watching a slideshow.

Using Captivate, I added some simple text effects and then add both still photos and the edited video files.  I also needed to make some adjustments to control the timing of the slides and their content which took some experimenting.

We still need to record our narration so we haven’t integrated piece yet. The narration is the next big step for us. Also I haven’t done a lot to make things pretty yet so forgive the bland background and text style. Most of the video clips do include rough audio so you can hear the sounds that go with the oscilloscope traces - some audio needs to be cleaned up still however.

So if you are ready to have a look at what we have so far just click on the photo. That launches a new browser window and you can watch out Introduction to the oscilloscope.  

Once last note …
In a previous blog entry I mentioned about having to rename VOB files to be MPEG so that I could edit them. It looks like the latest version of Premiere Pro (which I just got) supports pulling in VOB file directly!

Next steps ....

John is working on the script for the narration of the other segments. We'll also work on getting some audio recorded so I can integrate that into the Captivate project.

Stay tuned!

Permalink: http://www.brookdalecc.edu/fac/tlc/fac/blogs/video-big/blog_post.php?id=5

Moving Forward with a few Hiccups!

We have been using a HandyCam MiniDVD to record our video. The TLC is lending John and I a Sony  DCR-DVD108 (shown to the right) to record the footage. It a nice little piece of equipment and easy to use.

So what’s the issue? Well, unknown to me at the time the video file format used for DVD’s, which is called VOB – short for Video Object, isn’t recognized by most of the video editing programs I have tried. They just wouldn’t import the file into the application for use. This of course got me pretty nervous and, as I usually do in these cases, I hit the web and goggled for an explanation, and more importantly, a solution.

Sure enough I found a few hits that matched my issue. Seems I’m far from the first to run into this problem. Luckily, more experienced folks than me proposed a few workarounds.

I could get a download product, one of many, that can transfer the VOB file into a friendlier format like MPEG or AVI. These formats can be used with most video applications. I ran a few free trials and these seemed to work okay. I was a bit nervous though since these programs seemed to be, unofficially at least, targeted for folks who might want to grab the content from commercial DVDs.  Most of the company sites were not "based locally"  ( if you catch my drift).  Also their payment procedures didn't leave me with a  warm and fuzzy feeling. Of course I’m not accusing anyone of anything nor am I implying that people that use these products should be mocked or rounded-up. 

With all this, I wasn’t sure I wanted  to go this path. Plus, it seemed like this would mean I might need 2 video editing applications – one to get the content from the DVD and another to edit the video the way wanted.

I decided to do some more in-depth goggling and see what else might be there. After some more intense searching, I found some great answers online. It seems that you can just rename the file extension of the VOB file to MPEG and most video editing programs will import the content! Hmm… a fact not mentioned by all those other products.

Here’s a couple of the links that were helpful:

So there ya’ have it folks. Google to the rescue again! I just hope it doesn’t let me down when the next issue arrives.

This past week John and I shot some more footage for the introduction and also shot some for the third segment. John has done a lot of work to create his “masterpiece”. Here’s a look at the circuits he put together on a proto-board to help us get the signals we wanted to record. This little baby can boost audio signals, generate a ripple counter and also modulate a signal using AM! 

 

On a side note, it was with sadness that I saw TV’s Mr. Wizard past away recently. I and a lot of other kids grew up on his experiments. I wonder if they are looking for a replacement? John might be their guy – well at least after we finish this project. 

Permalink: http://www.brookdalecc.edu/fac/tlc/fac/blogs/video-big/blog_post.php?id=4

We have our first story board and "reel" footage.

John and I did a little asynchronous working for the last week or so and then got together for an hour to review a storyboard for our video’s introduction segment. We also shot video footage for the introduction and the next segment.

My last blog gave some examples of what the introduction would include. In this entry, I’ll share the storyboard with you as a PDF file and explain what where we are headed. I also want to give you some initial feedback on one of the software applications I have been evaluating and will use for the project.

From a project perspective, creating the storyboards is a key component to keeping the project moving in the correct direction and minimizing the need to recreate work in the long term. Using initial discussion and emails, John and I first decide on what the goals of a segment should be and them what material needs to be included to meet those goals. From that we discussion the narration, what footage we think we need and also the education exercise to reinforce the lesson. Using this I try to create an outline and then a storyboard for a particular segment.

I try to include as much detail as needed to map out what we need to complete a segment. This includes the narration script for audio recording, notes on the visual footage or graphical elements needed and also the flow from one “scene” to another. Since we are doing this project to create educational material I also want to include the exercise(s) that make of the lesson.

  John came up with some great examples for the introduction. He created some circuits to use some existing demo boards to allow us to have some great audio and visual demonstrations for the introduction. 

We also got some preliminary footage this week for the next segment which is on how to measure signal amplitude with the scope. I still need to create the storyboard and work with John on the narration but we are moving forward.

Permalink: http://www.brookdalecc.edu/fac/tlc/fac/blogs/video-big/blog_post.php?id=3

Initial Planning (What have we gotten ourselves into?!)

Permalink: http://www.brookdalecc.edu/fac/tlc/fac/blogs/video-big/blog_post.php?id=2

Okay we got some money - now the work begins.

ELEC 103 is an introductory electronics course that I have been teaching as an Adjunct Professor for the Engineering and Technology Department. The students of this course arrive with various backgrounds and levels of experience. While some of the students have recently graduated from high school or are in their first terms at college, others are coming from industry and established careers.

 While teaching ELEC 103, I noticed that many students required more examples of problems being solved in front of the class. Additionally there are students who need to have the same problem solved more than once to make them more comfortable with completing the class assignments. During the Spring ’07 term, I created some online tutorials using Camtasia Studio. This application, which lets you record audio and screen captures, let me solve circuit analysis and math problems and as examples for the class. I shared these with the students during our ANGEL pilot program and  got positive feedback from the students.

The first purpose of this project is to develop new video material that will also provide interaction to reinforce the student’s comprehension. These interactive video/exercises will be available online and available for students 24/7 which will give them more opportunity to learn the lab material.

Beyond the development of ELEC 103 online laboratory materials, the second part of our work  will  include an evaluation of tools, software, and design approaches that will be used to create a interactive video development approach that will be available to other course instructors and departments who might benefit from developing their own interactive video content. 

Permalink: http://www.brookdalecc.edu/fac/tlc/fac/blogs/video-big/blog_post.php?id=1

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