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Video Prep for publishing in Glow

The following article provides an overview of the procedure I am using to publish a large number of videos in Glow. This work started when a friend of mine started to produce a number of videos to support his work in teaching Wood Craft at S3 and S4.

The thinking that underpins this work is to provide a resource which can be used by pupils in class to view a process demo on video at a time when the teacher is other wise engages – perhaps helping other pupils. This has the effect of making it possible for pupils to progress when otherwise they would need to wait for their turn to get direct assistance from the class teacher. Another possibility is that pupils can “look ahead” to see what is coming next in the curriculum – this is a Flipped Learning approach.

I did a lot of experimentation to find the best way forward with this and ended up with the following solution.  My initial hope was to do the whole process in glow – but as there is no video publishing service in glow this was not possible.

Capturing the Video
The videos are captured by the class teacher using a camera which is owned by the school. The resulting video files are then copied to Laptop computer which is kept in the classroom. Pupils have the option to view the videos directly on this laptop and this is what pupils did in the first place.  These videos are raw and unedited so we wanted to make them available on a more generally accessible platform.  The files are quite large and use the following codec H264, MPEG – 4 AVC and can be played back using VLC.

Editing the videos
The videos were transferred a Mac and loaded into Final Cut Pro for editing.  Here they were segmented as necessary and a leader and trailer was added.  The original videos would typically include a range of process and for publishing we wanted them to be accessible in smaller videos which dealt with one process at a time – for example Marking out the Mortice or Cutting the Mortice etc….

Once edited the videos were exported from FCP using a profile which makes the video suitable for web publishing.
Export settings as follows

Format – Web Publishing
Codec – H.264
Resolution – 960*540

Post Processing
The resulting files are then further processed using ImTOO Video Convertor Ultimate V6 – this is a video convertor I have used and am familiar with but I am sure that others could also be used.  I used a standard profile for encoding the final product for publishing on Vimeo.  ImTOO reduces the file size considerably and has a batch processing facility which makes this process possible with minimum user intervention.

Publishing
The videos are then published using Vimeo and then embedded it  a Glow SharePoint Site for people to access.  Following is an example finished product

Cutting the Corner Mitre Bridle from Jim Buchan on Vimeo.

This is what the main access page looks like in Glow as I know many people watching this will not be able to view the actual resources as they will not have a Glow account.  This is the front page of a glow share point site.  The orange text are links to site pages which include the videos which themselves are published on Vimeo at present.

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