Multimedia

1. Poster
 * Multimedia **

I used Picnik and Glogster to create a poster concerning submerged combustion. This is a technology where a flame is located under scrap metal to help melt it down so it can be made into new steel. I worked on this technology many years ago and recently converted my 35 mm slides of the project into electronic images. However, those images definitely needed cropping and adjusting so I used Picnik to do that.

I particularly liked the Sharpen and Auto-fix features in Picnik which made some old photos look much better. I found that the free version of Picnik works easily enough but has some limitations. For example, when loading images from the same folder, the software did not remember that location so each time I had to go through all the sub-directories to get to it. It did remember where previous photos were saved so I didn't have to go through the sub-directories during saving. However, I did have to add the file extension (.jpg) when saving, even though it was already on the save page in Picnik. I wanted to re-color some of the images that had black backgrounds and change them to white but I was not able to find that feature.

Glogster was used to produce the poster. While it is generally easy enough to use, there were some features that were lacking in the free version. For example, I could not figure out how to center text in a text block or how to pick a specific font size (the window could be re-sized but the resulting font size was unknown). The number of font styles was limited. The general editing could have been easier (maybe it is in the purchased version).

The completed poster can be found at:

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2. Podcast

I published my video as a podcast using Podomatic. This was very easy. The only minor glitch was the original higher resolution file was a problem to upload so I ended up using a lower resolution file which uploaded with no problems.

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3. Video Story

I recorded a video on Process Burner Types using a videocamera on a tripod. Unfortunately, there were at least 2 problems. The first is that the audio using the microphone built into the camera is not quite as loud as I would have liked. The second problem is that I could not afford a big name actor so I had to do it myself!

I noticed the link for Windows MovieMaker is for a version designed for Windows Vista and the link for Photostory 3 is designed for Windows XP. I found a free Microsoft video editor (Windows Movie Maker Live or WMML) for Windows 7 which is what I have. WMML was easy to use although it was not quite as flexible as I would have liked. For example, you can easily insert a picture into a video, but the picture will take up the entire frame. There were some instances where I wanted to insert an image into the video to be a small part of the existing video frames as an overlay but I was not able to do that. I also would have liked to be able to insert multiple separate text boxes and arrows but I was not able to do those either.

I first tried to publish my video in VoiceThread but was unable to do so because of memory limits for the type of free account I have. The original file was almost 100 MB so I tried re-saving it at a lower resolution which reduced the file size to about 18 MB. I was not able to upload either into VoiceThread. Instead I published the video to YouTube:

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