Suggestions on how to collect student videos

[Peter Beyersdorf]

Hi All,

One of my colleagues, Alej Garcia, is teaching a physics of animation
class and has students create short CGI videos that they need to
submit as homework. Currently each student has a blog (on
blogger.com) and he has them post the videos into the blog, which
works well because he can leave feedback in the comments area and can
easily keep track of which video belongs to whom. What doesn't work
well is that the Blogger server plays the video back with some
stuttering - which makes it impossible for him to judge the quality of
the work. He has asked me for other suggestions for this workflow. I
was thinking of having the students post to youtube and linking the
file onto the blog. Does anybody else have other ideas based on your
own experience?

Thanks,

Peter Beyersdorf
Department of Physics
Science Building #235
San Jose State University
(408) 924-5236

[Peter Young]

G'day -

The issue is that the students - in most cases do NOT know how to crunch down their little videos properly to have others view them.  If you use YouTube... YT will crunch down each submission into Flash-Video... which drops the quality down between 8% and 15% of the original.  There will also be a few dropped frames... as evident by the comments below when posting on Blogger.com [which is also owned by Google and takes those videos down even further...].

Wordpress and several other sites that were once free - are now charging a nominal fee for posting but have an upper limit on the size of the video... and thus the rub.  I would love to give a short class on video compression and "asset management' to a group of faculty some day soon.

Cheers -

Peter Young

Adjunct Instructor, New Media

JMC

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[Debbie Faires]

----- Message Text -----

Other free media hosting sites like Vimeo.com or blip.tv also work well.
Or does SJSU have a server that could host student media files? Those
sites should be able to serve out the video nicely. Then the video could
be linked from the blog post.

Debbie Faires
School of Library and Information Science
San Jose State University

[James Morgan]

yes, if you could link to an example that might help, have you ruled
out bandwidth as an issue? also I find that I do not like the codecs
that some hosts offer, but vimeo allows large high quality full frame
rate videos

james

Anything that can be made, can be made black.

[Keith Sanders]

Please conserve: Think before you print this email.

Peter,

When video is squeezed into a streaming media format, frame rates go down and resolution suffers. Animation demands high quality so I would recommend that students burn their videos to DVD.  The MPEG2 files on a DVD are compressed a little, but much less than video for the web.

Better yet, if the students can bring their videos to class in Flash drives, they could be viewed from the hard drive of a desktop computer (hopefully something with 7200 RPM) using Windows Media Player or Quicktime player. I don't know their native format.

If this is impractical, I suggest that at least all streaming videos be played back from the hard drive of a desktop to eliminate network slowdowns. Unfortunately the compression artifacts would remain.

Keith Sanders
Media Producer
SJSU

Peter Beyersdorf <peter.be...@sjsu.edu> Sent by: sjsu-technolo...@googlegroups.com 11/09/2009 03:42 PM

To “TILC“ <sjsu-technolo...@googlegroups.com> cc Alejandro Garcia <alga...@algarcia.org> Subject [Technology Innovators] Suggestions on how to collect student videos

[Ted Coopman]

Peter and Alejandro,

I have good luck with video on pbworks.com. I generally either embed the video from YouTube or rip it via keepvid and actually upload the entire video. Although, I think uploading it to YouTube and then just embedding it would be the easiest fix.

If I was having students turn these in for full evaluation, I would go with having students upload the video to YouTube and send the instructor the url. Then load the urls into keepvid <http://keepvid.com/> download it (high or low quality). I use this technique if I want to have video for slides with stressing baout internet connections.

-TED

Ted M. Coopman Ph.D.
Lecturer
Department of TV, Radio, Film, and Theatre
Department of Communication Studies
San Jose State University

----- Original Message ----
From: Peter Beyersdorf <peter.be...@sjsu.edu>
To: “TILC“ <sjsu-technolo...@googlegroups.com>
Cc: Alejandro Garcia <alga...@algarcia.org>
Sent: Mon, November 9, 2009 3:41:57 PM
Subject: [Technology Innovators] Suggestions on how to collect student videos