More Comments Equals More Views

Monday I posted another skiing YouTube video listing my top 5 favorite sidecountry ski areas. One thing about throwing out a term like "sidecountry" is that if you ask 10 different people, you may get 11 different responses on what it means. I provided a definition in the video and it is getting several comments. Some people don't agree with my definition and are asking questions.

At first glance, it seems like all of these comments are causing YouTube's algorithm that shares videos to push this new one to the front. I published another video on Saturday about preparing for the upcoming ski season and it doesn't have nearly the traffic even though it came out 2 days before this latest one. My hypothesis is that comments indicate engagement and so they think others will also like the video so YouTube is sharing it more.

All of this traffic for my video suggests I can get more traffic by creating controversial content. That does have a downside though. If people don't like your content, they might disengage from the channel. I also don't like controversy. While it is fine to disagree with an undefined word, there is also the chance people could be offended and I make an extra effort not to offend people.

I plan to watch video views over the next few weeks and see if the trend hold true. I may need to solicit a few of my friends to submit comments and see how that effects outside views. Currently I have a number of new viewers but not any new subscribers. If the number of subscribers increases, that will strengthen my hypothesis. I'll be sure to keep you posted.  

My Latest YouTube Releases

One advantage of working for Sony is that we get 4-day weekends for both Memorial and Labor Day. I like it because we get the Friday off before the Monday holidays and that gives me a bit of extra time to get stuff done. One year I used the that time to go visit Alaska and do some ocean kayaking. This year I did something different: I released 2 YouTube videos.

I woke up on Friday and decided I would try and put out a video in a single day. There is a lot of work that goes into each video and I wasn't sure I could do it but wanted to give it a try. I sat down at my computer and put together a compelling script. Then I recorded the narration. The subject of the video is preparing for the 2025/26 ski season. I came close but didn't quite finish the video in a single day. I had to roll over onto Saturday but got it released that evening.

In order to put out the video quickly, I had to interrupt another video I started creating over a year ago. I liked the topic but just didn't feel the need to get the video out and so it languished on my computer in a half-done state for months. Getting a video put out early in the weekend ignited a desire to finish an update on my second most popular video on the Top 5 Sidecountry Ski Areas of North America. My wife had to do some sewing and so she gave me permission yesterday to sit in front of my computer and finish the video. I completed everything last night and immediately released it.

Of the 2 videos, the Sidecountry one is my favorite. I can't really pinpoint why I didn't finish it earlier. I know one thing that slowed me down was not having enough photo and video content for one of the ski areas. I had to go back through an old photo album and scan pictures from back in the 1980's. I have a really good scanner and once I digitized the images, the video sat uncompleted for months. Perhaps laziness kept me from working on it or I valued spending my time on other pursuits. Ultimately I got it done and in less than 24 hours it has been viewed close to 100 times.

In the past, the closest I have ever released 2 videos is 5 days. This marks the first time I have done it in 2 days. I will be interested to see how that effects the number of views. My channel has about 650 subscribers and I hope to get more. Unfortunately I have not received any new ones since the first video on Friday. Perhaps there is something else I need to do to increase my popularity. Until then, I hope everyone enjoys the videos.

Getting More YouTube Views

For the past 5 weeks I have been trying to put out one new video on my YouTube channel every week. The reason is that I wanted to see if frequent posting of content changes the number of views my videos receive. It does and the numbers are interesting.

YouTube provides analytics that I can check whenever I want. Looking at those statistics I see that I used to get roughly tens of recommendations by YouTube for my videos on a daily basis. That means that of all the viewers on YouTube looking for skiing or adventure videos, only ten or so will have the chance to see one of mine. That's not a lot.

When I started posting more videos, that number shot up significantly. As long as I posted weekly, YouTube recommended my content around three to four hundred times per day. Yes some of that can be attributed to the fact that I have more videos to choose from and so I looked at another statistic. I waited 8 days before I posted my video last night. Before posting that video, the number of times YouTube recommended my content had dropped down below a hundred. After posting it, the number of recommendations increased significantly again.

So what does all of this mean? Simply posting content more frequently gets you more views. I am now trying to figure out a way to post more frequently. Evidence suggests that posting daily would dramatically increase my audience. Unfortunately I put a lot of work into each of my videos and a side-effect of posting more frequently would mean a reduction in quality. I hope that isn't the case as that would mean a bunch of short junk videos would gain a larger audience than longer well-crafted ones. I hope that viewers would be somewhat discriminatory with what they watch.

I will see what I can do to post more frequently without a reduction in quality and see if the data agrees with my hypothesis or not. In any event, I am learning a lot and that is the whole reason I am creating videos.

Video Quality Assurance

Last week I spent 3 days backcountry skiing with my two sons and one of my oldest son's friends. As I am trying to put out a YouTube video every week, I quickly assembled the footage, wrote a narrative, added some background music and posted the resulting video. In the first viewing, I immediately noticed 3 different errors. One would think I didn't do any error checking of the video while I assembled it but that would be wrong. I had gone through it over a dozen times.

One issue I had is that I had to go back and rerecord the initial narration clip. For some reason it is not as loud as the others and so I had to bump the sound level so that it matches the rest of the video. That is easy to do and by itself would not warrant redoing the video.

The second issue I found is that I have one movie clip where I have my thumb in the lower right. It is not large and easy to remove with a bit of editing. The sad thing is that one of my checks is to specifically look for my thumb as my action camera makes it easy to include that particular digit. Only after posting the video to YouTube did I finally see the problem. Again, that would not cause me to fix the issue and repost a new version.

The real problem came in the closing credits. I like using free background music from Bensound as all I need to do is identify the song and give the URL to the website.  As I created the credits, I hadn't decided which song to actually use. Rather than leave the section blank, I put the word "Something." Unfortunately that really did need to be fixed even though I put the correct information in the video description. I had to go in and delete the old video and re-upload the corrected one. Fortunately that didn't take too long.

It never fails. I think I have done an excellent job reviewing the quality of my latest video. Then I upload it to YouTube and I notice all sorts of problems. Fortunately I caught these 3 issues before anyone other than myself had the chance to view the video. Otherwise I would have lost several video views. Those that post frequently know how important they can be. Especially as one tries to grow his or her audience.

A YouTube Experiment

In my last post I mentioned I published a new video on YouTube about the Top 5 Steepest Ski Areas in North America. Today I published a follow-up video about the Top 5 Powder Ski Areas in North America. My experiment is to see if publishing content more closely spaced together leads to a wider audience. So far I have to say it has been somewhat of a disappointment. 

I published my "Steep" video and then broadcast it on LinkedIn and here on my blog. There are not a lot of regular readers to the blog and so I know it doesn't generate too much traffic. I do have over 500 contacts on LinkedIn and so I did get a lot of people watching the video. Some of those contacts shared the video with others and I managed to pick up about a dozen new subscribers. My hope is that those subscribers will continue to remain engaged and share the channel with others.

I published my "Powder" video a few hours ago and have not seen any traffic other than my own viewing to make sure it uploaded correctly. Perhaps I am not giving it enough time and people need to get notified that I put up the new video. I will give it a few days and then do some promoting and see if that helps. I don't want to rely on my LinkedIn network though and will have to come up with some creative ways to spread the news. If anyone has any ideas. Please feel free to send me a comment.

Creating My Next YouTube Video

For the past several years I have been working on a single YouTube video and it is almost completed. This video has been rather difficult in that I have done things out of order. Normally I create a script and then go find content. This time I have a bunch of content from years of skiing at a number of different resorts. I created a script that matches my message and now I am trying to pull videos and images from my content to match the script.

While I do have some flexibility to go and gather new content because I ski every day, some of the footage needs to be from ski areas that are not near my home. I don't want to use photos or videos from others as that runs the risk of copyright issues. Instead I find myself filling in parts of the video with closeups of trail maps. It works most of the time but sometimes there is no substitute for viewing the beauty of the actual resort and not someplace similar.

I am looking forward to releasing my next video as it will be somewhat controversial. Unfortunately that is one of the best ways to get a lot of views. So far I haven't received a single dislike for any of my videos. That will change with this one. I am pretty sure I will have to deal with a lot of negative comments as people disagree with my recommendations. We'll see how it goes. Wish me luck.

Growing Importance of Video Editing

There are a number of changes that have taken place in the world because of COVID-19 and more changes are coming. One of the changes I have noticed recently is the growing importance of video editing skills. It used to be that specialists would be responsible for such tasks. Now more and more people are having to put together videos as we are restricted from meeting in person because of the pandemic.

I first noticed videos proliferating as a form of communication within my community in Utah. Once a month I am being sent a link to a video. That video is very high-quality and provides updates on the local COVID-19 situation along with a message of encouragement in dealing with all of the various situations we are facing.

Now I am starting to see a number of presentations being done at work with videos instead of PowerPoint. The reasons for this are many. Some people feel more comfortable creating a video instead of speaking live. Others are trying to ensure time constraints are followed. I'm also sure others feel that video allows for a more flashy presentation. Ultimately video has some distinct advantages with more and more people taking advantage of them.

Several years ago I started putting together videos as a self-improvement project. I figured it would be a nice skill to have and have put together 4 videos so far that are available on my YouTube channel. I am in the middle of writing the narration for my next video about when I sailed a 37-foot racing sailboat from Hawaii to Los Angeles many years ago. Hopefully I will have it finished soon.

Here are some of the lessons I have learned creating my videos and hopefully they will help you:

1. Find a video editing tool that works for you and stick with it. Most tools have a number of features and it takes a bit of time to discover the full capabilities of the software you have chosen. I prefer using the Mac over Windows and so I use iMovie as it comes preloaded on all Macs.
2. Try to continually improve on your work. When I went to put together my most recent video, I went back and reviewed my 3 previous videos and made notes on what I could to improve. My 2020 Yurt video is my favorite because I fixed quite a few shortcomings found in the other videos.
3. Have people help review your videos. One of the most difficult things for me is to ask for someone to review my videos. While most comments I get are how well they look, I cringe when people find problems with them. Unfortunately those are the comments that will help you improve. I have one of my coworkers who is great at this and provides very useful feedback. He isn't malicious but sincerely wants to help me improve my work.
   
4. You don't have to use all of the features in your video editing software in every video. When word processing software began widespread use, some users felt obligated to use every font possible in a single-page document. In the end, it detracted from the work. The same can be said of video editing software. You don't need to use all 50 video transitions in a single 2-minute video. Make sure the features you use add to your message and don't detract from it.
5. Keep track of the settings for what you did so you can use what works or make things better for your next video. I feel like every time I go to create the narration for my videos, I have to relearn what settings I used on the last one. Now I keep copious notes during the video creation process so I don't have to relearn the various tools I use. 
   

Hopefully these 5 tips help should you want to start creating your own videos. As I get more experience with my next video, I'm sure I will be able to provide more hints and tricks.

My Latest YouTube Video

Last night I finally put the finishing touches on my latest YouTube adventure video. I actually had it done a week or so ago but didn't like some of the audio narration tracks. I got some time last night and rerecorded several sections. I have embedded the video below for your enjoyment.

Should you wish to share the video, you can do so with the following URL:

https://youtu.be/PXvJKCbLXXs

Hopefully you find it enjoyable.

My Bear Claw Yurt Video

A week and a half ago I went on a ski mountaineering trip with my two sons and a friend. We hiked into the Bear Claw yurt and spent the night. The next morning we woke up, hiked up a couple of mountains, and skied down them before returning to our car. I thought the entire experience would make a pretty good video and so I took some footage with one of my new GoPro knock-offs. I'll let you be the judge of the video but I think it came out pretty well.

This represents a different way of creating videos as I had the video completed and up for viewing on YouTube in about 10 days. We left on Thursday afternoon and I uploaded the completed product the following Saturday. When I started the trip with my sons, I had a rough idea of what I wanted to capture and just pulled out my camera every time I thought something interesting happened. When we got home, I reviewed the video and created a simple script describing the trip.

Every time I go to create a video, I feel like I have to relearn a number of the settings for the software I use to create the finished product. This time I took copious notes so it will be easier the next time. I also only created my last video a few months ago and so a lot of what I did was still fresh in my mind. I think the sound quality on this one came out much better than previous ones. There is still a bit of work to do though.

I am trying to create these videos as a method of improving my video creation skills. If you have any constructive comments, please feel free to let me know.

Increasing Blog Traffic

Lately I have been wondering how to increase traffic to this blog. I would also like to increase traffic to my YouTube channel and so I ran a little experiment. First I have to give credit to my wife who gave me the idea. She said that I can't just post stuff. I have to share the posting with as many people as possible. When you do that via e-mail, it is called SPAM. When you do it on social media sites like Facebook, it is considered normal.

I wanted to share a business article on LinkedIn and so I looked through my most recent posts. I could have chosen a video game review but I don't think that would have been received well. LinkedIn is just not the right audience for that. I also wanted to see if I could drive traffic to my YouTube channel at the same time. So I created a simple teaser that said something like, "Thinking of ditching your career and becoming the next YouTube celebrity?" I then provided a link to my "How to Make Money on YouTube" post. It fit the criteria I wanted as being business like as well as referencing my YouTube videos all over the place.

Traffic to my blog skyrocketed compared to normal. I had five times as many regular viewers for that post on the first day and three times as many the next. Furthermore I had people contact me via LinkedIn that I hadn't communicated with in years. I have to say that the first goal of getting more viewers to read my blog was a huge success.

With everyone reading an article about YouTube I thought that there would be a huge jump in video watching as well. Surprisingly the number of views for both of my videos never increased. That seems pretty strange because I usually get quite a few views of my Goblin Valley video every day with no promotion on my part. Nope, for the past 3 days the count has remained constant.

I also thought that my LinkedIn associates would see my blog and start looking at some of the other articles I have written. Nope, the only article being viewed is the one that I referenced in my post to LinkedIn.

I learned a lot with this little experiment. From now on, when I create a business post, I will make sure to post it to LinkedIn. It will help drive traffic to at least one article. It also beats doing nothing. Now if I could only figure out how to drive millions of views to my YouTube channel.

How to Make Money on YouTube

I few days ago one of my work colleagues saw a very simple video on YouTube that had something like 7  million views. It shows someone cutting open a Black Widow spider egg sack. While very educational, the video didn't take very much time to create. My coworker wondered how the two of us could make sensational videos to get a lot of views.

For those that don't read my blog, I have created 2 YouTube videos and I use my colleague at work to review them. He knows the ones I have created are just to help me improve my video creating skills and I have to say I have learned a lot. Unfortunately I have not gotten a lot of views. Today my total is only 204 combined for both videos. Even if I received a dollar for each video, I spent more making them that I would have been paid. But what if I didn't have a job and needed money quickly? How could I make money from YouTube?

Doing a quick Internet search and you will discover there are 5 basic ways to make money with YouTube and some of these strategies work well with other social media platforms like Instagram. The ways to make money are:

1. Advertising revenue
2. Affiliate marketing programs
3. Selling products
4. Sponsors
5. Crowdfunding

Let's look at each of these individually to get a better idea of what each means.

Advertising Revenue
Once you have enough views of your videos, you can add advertisements to them. YouTube has specific guidelines to make sure you have a large enough audience before they will allow you to start putting ads in your videos. The number you want to shoot for is about 4000 view hours within a year period (you also need 1000 subscribers). As I only have about 200 views (which translates to 26 view hours) over 8 months, I can't even think about putting ads on mine. This brings up an important point: to make money off YouTube, you need to get a lot of eyeballs watching your stuff. That will hold true for any of the 5 ways of making money.

Let's say you do manage to hit that million view milestone. How much is that going to earn you in just advertising revenue? After spending a few hours looking through numerous posts, the average seems to be about $1000 per million views. Some people make significantly less and others make more. There are a number of factors that go into how much you will make but $1000 is an easy number to play with and so we will run with that.

While the Black Widow video seems to have a lot of viewers, they have only made around $7000. If it only took them a day to create the video then that is not bad for a day of work. However think about someone who only has 1000 views. That amounts to only  $1. There must be better ways of making money with YouTube.

Affiliate Marketing Programs
There are a number of companies like Amazon that have affiliate marketing programs. The way they work is that you sign up and they provide you the equivalent of a coupon code. When you create the description of your video, you can add a link to a website where someone can purchase something that they might have seen in your video. If they actually buy the product, then you get a cut of the sale.


I'm not sure what purchase you could make from the Black Widow video. Perhaps tweezers or the razor-blade knife. In my Goblin Valley video I mention a company that will help you rappel into the Goblin's Lair. If they offered an affiliate marketing program and I provided the proper link in my video description, I might be able to get a few buck here or there should anyone buy their services. Furthermore I don't even have to hit the 4000 view hour mark before I start making money. Of course, as I have stated, if you want to make more money you need to get more people viewing your videos.

Selling Products
Affiliate marketing programs are great but you only get a small percentage of the sale you helped make. Another idea is to actually sell products from your video. If I wanted to sell "Aid Station 6" t-shirts from my Salt Flats Endurance run video, I could add a link to the description where viewers could purchase them. There are a number of companies that I could use to create the product and drop-ship them to customers so I didn't have to worry about inventory. T-shirts are just the beginning. I could do coffee mugs, shot glasses, or any other type of souvenir I think people might be interested in buying.


Sponsors
If your videos get enough views there is the chance that you can attract companies to pay you to create videos. Unfortunately I don't think that is going to happen with my paltry 204 views. Perhaps if I work and get that number up to a respectable few hundred thousands, the Utah State Parks department might come and ask me to create videos for some of the other amazing parks they administer. I don't think that will be the case and it is not something I am looking to do. I actually plan to do a few more Utah state parks in the future simply because they are great places to visit. There is no need to pay me.

There are a number of websites that can help you find sponsors for videos but they require that you have several thousand followers and a significant number of views.

Crowdfunding
If your number of views is too small to qualify you for sponsors, there is always the crowdfunding route. You can always ask people to donate to you through something like Patreon. With this you can ask for support for the work you have already done or even ask people to help with your next project.

When my colleague and I started looking at how to make money through YouTube, we saw how much work it required and how many views are needed if advertising is the only revenue source. It made us rather depressed. There are other sources of income though and the successful YouTube stars leverage many of them.

For the moment I don't have visions of dollar signs in my eyes as I begin creating my next video. My goal remains the same: to get better at making videos. Should I start getting noticed, that will just be icing on the cake. Until then, I am happy with what I have created.

My Latest Video: Salt Flats 100

This evening I finally finished my latest video for YouTube. It is a short history of the Salt Flats Endurance run, formerly known as the Salt Flats 100. The purpose of the video is to help improve my video making skills and so any feedback is appreciated. No need to comment here as commenting on the video is preferred.

Here is the short link to the video for your convenience:

https://youtu.be/zeN_RBMFciQ

I created the video using the MP4 format. When I played the video on my computer, everything sounded pretty good. Then when I uploaded it to YouTube and played it on my desktop, the audio seems a bit off in places. I am not sure if that is because of headphones vs. speakers or if the conversion from MP4 to YouTube's format caused any problems. In any event, I will probably be editing the audio levels and re-releasing the video.

With this video released, I am now ready to begin my next one. I have a few ideas but input is always appreciated. My preference is for videos related to the outdoors as it gives me a chance to not spend so much time inside.

Entertaining an Infant

Yesterday I had the chance to bring my grandson from Utah to California on my weekly commute. He spent the week splitting time between both his maternal and paternal grandparents while his mom and dad vacationed in Europe. As my grandson is only 15-months old, I didn't need to pay any extra airfare to bring him with me.

As a frequent flyer, I know it can be a huge annoyance when someone brings an unruly child on the flight. I always pack earplugs just in case there is a noisy kid sitting close by. I didn't want to subject my fellow travelers to a screaming toddler, especially since we were sitting in First Class. Unfortunately the flight didn't start out too well. I had to wake my grandson up early so we could catch our flight. That made him a little grumpy. We got on the plane and he kept making a lot of noise. Not nice noises but screaming noises. The kind that annoy everyone. I started to worry that my fellow passengers would throw us off if I didn't come up with a way to quiet him down.

My son and his wife had sent us a number of videos throughout their trip and we tried to reciprocate by sending videos of their son. To quiet the upset toddler, I pulled out my phone and started showing him videos of his dad. That helped a bit and then I started a 20-second video where my grandson wanders around the living room and then falls on his bum. For some strange reason, the little boy loved watching the video of himself falling down. He would laugh every time. We watched the video 30 to 40 times before the flight even left the ground. Each time, my grandson would laugh hysterically watching himself stumble. We watched it so many times I grew afraid that we would chew through my phone's battery before we landed in San Francisco.

After about the 40th time of watching the video, the plane started rolling down the runway and we climbed into the air. We had a bit of turbulence all the way to 39,000 feet and that gently rocked my grandson to sleep. He then slept the entire flight.

If you find yourself preparing for a long flight with a toddler, you might want to take a few videos of the child before heading to the airport. Hopefully you find one that makes the kid laugh. It may help keep your fellow passengers from asking you to ride on the wing.

Creating Computer Map Animations

One nice thing about creating a video for YouTube is having a good example of technology that I can reference. Collecting videos and photos is relatively easy. When it came to adding animated maps of where Goblin Valley is located, I did not know what to do. I knew that Google has a pretty good maps of anywhere in the world and so I started there. I tried to do everything with Google Maps but then thought about using Google Earth. Earth is better for doing flyovers like I have at the beginning of the video (at 0:29). You are limited with the web version of Google Earth and I recommend the stand-alone application as it is significantly more flexible.

So how did I do the animations for the other 2 maps (at 1:25 and 5:56)? I asked one of my coworkers for ideas and he suggested using Microsoft PowerPoint. I know how to do that and so I took a screen shot from Google Maps, loaded it into PowerPoint, then added some circles and arrows. Now I just needed to record the animation on my screen. I used the Quicktime player on my Mac to do that. How? Well Quicktime allows you to do screen recordings. I simply started Quicktime and went into the "File" menu where there is a "New Screen Recording" menu item. It brings up a red record button. When I clicked on the button, it asked me to select the part of the screen I wanted to record. Once I selected it, a large "Start Recording" button appeared. Then when I was done recording, I brought up the application bar and right-clicked on the Quicktime icon. It brought up a menu with a menu item to "Stop Recording." Quicktime then allows you to save the MP4 movie file anywhere you want.

Once I had all of my videos, photos, and animations, I combined them all together using iMovie. Everything came together quite easily looked great. The last thing I did was to add in music and my narration. For that I used GarageBand, but this is a topic for another post.

My First YouTube Video

I have spent the past couple of months putting together my first YouTube video. It is not nearly as easy as throwing together a blog post and so I don't plan on doing very many of them. I did learn a lot about the process though and that is why I put together this one.

While I enjoy spending time in front of my computer, I much prefer spending time outside. I wanted to start putting together some videos about our National Parks. Then I discovered that you need to have an expensive permit if you plan to record video for anything other than your personal use. So instead of starting with a National Park, I decided to start with Goblin Valley State Park. Note that there is no such restriction for photographs.

There are a lot of poor quality YouTube videos and I didn't want my video to fall into that same category so I tried to do it right the first time. I created my own script before heading down to the park. That gave me an idea of what video I needed. Then in March I drove to Goblin Valley State Park where I met my son with his wife and puppy. We spent the next day wandering around the park taking pictures and gathering video. I had 3 other people helping me take pictures along with 2 separate video cameras. One is an old camcorder unit while the other is an older action camera. We used the action camera for all of the rappelling shots. I plan to update both video cameras in the future but wanted to use what I had for this experiment.

As I compiled the video and showed early versions to family, I got some very important feedback. While I had a lot of video of the park, most people liked the still camera shots except for the rappelling scene. Video made that part more dramatic.

No video is complete without a soundtrack. I had all of my video edited together and then found a piece of music that I can use for free with attribution to the artist. It is no coincidence that my video is around 7 minutes long and exactly the same length as the music.

The last thing to do was to record the narration soundtrack. Recently I purchased a high-end condenser microphone complete with shock mount and pop guard. Then I locked myself in my bedroom which had the best acoustics in the house for recording my voice. Combining the narration with the music and my edited video didn't take long at all.

As I mentioned, I created the video as a learning experience. I am very interested in feedback. Is the video boring or does it hold your interest? Do you want to visit Goblin Valley State Park now? Please feel free to send me comment as I am looking to improve for my next video.

Downloading YouTube Videos

Last week my son asked if I could come and speak in his careers class. I wanted to include some videos and so I scoured the Internet looking for MPEGs that I could embed into a PowerPoint presentation. With the ubiquity of Flash and YouTube, there don't seem to be MPEG videos on the Internet any more. At least not the types of videos I was looking for.

Eventually I got tired of searching as I knew exactly where to get them: on YouTube. So I changed my search criteria to find out how to download them from YouTube.

Unfortunately you can't believe everything you read on the Internet. There were a lot of false starts that were just plain wrong. Eventually I was able to discover an "Add On" for Mozilla that allows you to save the Flash video file (with the .FLV extension). Once I had that downloaded, I discovered that PowerPoint doesn't understand them. I needed to convert the FLV file into an MPEG. I used the ffmpeg utility on Linux, but even that wasn't straight forward. I had to calculate bit rates and figure out the screen size. Luckily screen sizes are fairly standard and Adobe has a bit rate calculator. Once I figured that all out, I created the MPEGs from the FLVs and embedded them in my presentation.

This morning I delivered my presentation and it went very well. It took a lot longer to create my presentation than anticipated, but the kids loved the videos.

My Poor Wife, Part I

My wife is great! She loves to ski and lets me ski as much as I am able. She loves to sail and lets me live on a sailboat during the week. She is a great cook and wonderful mother. Her only flaw is that she married me, someone that spends a bit too much time with computers.

Over the past 24 hours, she has had to take care of several computer related problems at home because I am not there. She has done a great job, but I imagine her patience is wearing thin and I can only hope that something else doesn't go wrong.

Yesterday my youngest son came home with some friends from school to work on a project for his German class. The idea was to make a video or DVD. As we have a great camera capable of shooting true high-definition (HD) video, this shouldn't have been a problem. My son and his classmates created the various pieces of footage and were ready to edit everything together. That is where the first problem began.

I never realized that computers and video cameras could be monogamous. My laptop that I have with me in San Francisco is the computer that is set up to work with my video camera. All I have to do is attach the USB cable between them and the two devices know how to talk to each other. Once I get the footage on my machine, it is a simple matter of editing it with iMovie and then using iDVD to create a disk that will work in most DVD players. Yesterday, my camera did not want to talk to any other computers. My oldest son tried to get the camera to work with the family Mac without any luck. My wife, being the wise woman that she is, took the camera up to my dad's who tried to get it to talk with his Mac. Again, no luck.

Normally I wouldn't suggest anyone's parents for computer help. Generally your best bet is to go with someone younger, like one of your children. However, My dad has been working with computers for the last 40 years and is generally a good backup when I am out of town. After searching the Internet, they were able to come up with a workaround solution and were able to get the video off the camera. Currently that video is stored on a flash-drive and will be edited after school today. We will see how that process goes.

I went to sleep last night happy to know that my son's project was well on its way to being done. Considering it isn't due until Friday, I applaud my son for starting early. When I woke up, a second and completely unrelated computer problem arose and it was up to my trusty wife to solve yet another issue . . .