I've been playing around with a few different ways to create and share videos. Here are my thoughts, victories, frustrations, etc.
Vine
This is a free app that I downloaded to my iphone. It was not available for ipad. Vine allows the user to create 6 second looping videos that are then shared on the Vine app, Facebook, or Twitter. You can also email them to yourself to get a link to embed them on your blog, etc. This app was very fun and easy to use. You can see examples of very creative little videos via the app and at this blog post. This app feels very much like the video head cousin of Instagram.
Here is my simple video tour of our backyard. It is such a beautiful day - I just wanted to go outside! How would this app be used in the classroom or library? Making a short how-to video to go with a how-to paper. Give a tour. Make a stop motion animated book trailer. The possibilities are, of course, endless.
(Click in the box to turn on the movie. You need to click on the little speaker at the top left to hear my amazing commentary, I think.)
iMovie
I downloaded iMovie to my iPad mini and experimented with making a video of our family, just for practice. The app cost $4.99. I made the videos with my iPhone because I just wasn't thinking, and then I needed to get them to my iPad. So, a quick Google search led me to a free app, Simple Transfer, that would let me send my videos between devices via our wireless network. Very simple to use. I added all my videos to iMovie, edited out the little parts that I didn't want, added captions, etc. iMovie was very user friendly and never made me want to pull my hair out. That is a very important rating system. :) Leo (fourth grade) loves to use iMovie.
Next, I uploaded it to YouTube so that I would be able to share it here. The first time I uploaded to YouTube, you could barely hear any of the audio. I went back into the editing screen of iMovie and turned the volume up as high as it would go, and then I uploaded it again. Strangely, Henry's talking at the end was very understandable, but the rest of us were still too quiet. When I checked back on the editing screen, his was the only volume that had stayed at max. So I moved them all to max AGAIN and made sure that they stayed that way. The third time was the charm, and here is my little video.
And, finally, MS Movie Maker.
I took a little class on how to use this software during the TLA convention. When I got home, I discovered that we had an older version of movie maker. I wanted to use the same little clips that I used in the iMovie video above to basically make the same movie and compare the two tools. You will notice that there is no movie shared below. The short story is that I made the video, but I can't get it to share to YouTube without a bunch of hoops, so I have given up for a little while. I will come back to it. Here is the LONG version.
*The video clips were made on IPhones. I had to download a converter to change them from .MOV to .MPEG. I found a free one to use. It installed a bunch of junk on my computer, too! Yay!
*In my little TLA class, I learned to make an animated slide on PowerPoint and then save it as a .wmv. This can be used as the intro/title slide on the movie, and it will have great little animations. Well, I have Power Point 07, and it does not have the capability to save a file as a .wmv. I tried using Google Presentations, but that couldn't do it either. So I decided - ok, no animation. I'll just import the plain ppt title slide. I did, and it worked fine.
*I spent about two hours making the movie, adding captions, a closing credits slide, getting everything edited just right. The editing was not as easy as it is on iMovie.
*When I went to upload it to YouTube, it would not accept it as a .whatever (haha) that came from Movie Maker. It turns out that the newer version of Movie Maker can export it straight to YouTube, but our old version does not. I need to download yet ANOTHER converter to do this, and so I decided I was done with this for awhile.
It was definitely easier on the newer version of Movie Maker that we used in the class, so I will try again when I have access to that. It's a free download, but I think I've had all the technology fun I can stand for today. I like the flexibility that MSMM offers over iMovie, but iMovie definitely does not have quite so steep a learning curve. And, of course, the old software was a big frustration. I should have just uploaded it from the beginning, but I did not realize it was free. I thought it was part of the whole Office suite pkg.
What other movie sharing apps/software/etc. should I experiment with?
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