Syncing audio and video for optimum results

Seaghan was webcasting a conference last week, and I edited it down into clips to be broadcast through Vimeo. Unfortunately, I had some trouble with the quality of the audio, or rather the editing software; Sony Vegas finds it difficult to process clips longer than about an hour, with the result that the audio can be corrupted. Luckily, Seaghan had also recorded the audio separately, so I underwent the painstaking task of syncing the audio with the video. This actually wasn't as hard as I was expecting; it just took a lot of attention to detail. Generally it's not too hard to tell if you zoom in on the audio timeline to focus on the soundwave image, and make sure that it's aligned where it should be. (The video file with the audio was not corrupt itself, so the soundwaves remained intact.) In some situations though, it can get very difficult, particularly if you've been staring at the same clip for a long time! I find the best thing to do in this situation is just to take a break and work on something else for a little while. And, luckily for me, the conference had some very interesting speakers so that also helped to make the work go more quickly! I then uploaded the clips to Vimeo so that the conference attendees could access them.

SEO for Babyzone.ie

Myself and Trevor have continued with the SEO project for Babyzone.ie and we've got some good results already. For many products, the site wasn't showing up in Google searches at all. However, with a little skillful manipulation of keywords, meta tags, alt tags, and content text, several of the products are now showing up in the top ten and top five in Google. Some are even at number one or two, such as the Baby Elegance Pebble travel system.

The key here is not to overload the page with keywords - over 3% or 4% will make the search engines suspicious! The key is really to create high quality content that people want to read, rather than horrible text littered with keywords. Making good heading tags is important as well, so that Google knows which text is the most important. Adding emphasis (eg <em> or <strong> tags) will also pinpoint the words that Google should be looking for.

Articulate Storyline - Museum App

I've spent the last few days working on an app to guide users around a museum. I've created fives scenes: Title page, Introduction (featuring a slideshow), About the museum, Our Collections, and Hotspot. The title page is designed around the live tiles of Windows 8, and the tiles grow and move.

 The rest of the app is based on a similar design, but I mixed up the positioning of the tiles to keep it fresh.

 I've made heavy use of hover functionality and animations to lose the element of 'texbookness' that often goes with e-learning resources. Transitions and animations also liven the slides up. I've copied the colour scheme from the museum's own site, and the images are not my own - I've simply used them for illustrative purposes and they will not be used in the final app.

Last week's webcast

The webcast on Friday went really well. We were in a new location so there were new setup issues to consider such as the source of the internet connection, availability of cables, etc etc, but Conor at the Radisson was really helpful and provided us with any extras we needed.

Using Telestream Desktop Presenter was much better to update the bids live than to simply input the information into Wirecast. We set up Presenter on two different computers (one that already had Wirecast, and a spare laptop). From Wirecast, I created a Presenter scene, and connected to the other machine via the network, where I had created an editable file with bidding information. I updated this file as the auction went on, thus not overloading Wirecast with information.

In the top right corner, the banner with the price is not actually part of Wirecast, but an external Google Docs presentation from another computer.

It was great experience to be able to manage the project myself, although I had great help from Andrew and Trevor. Andrew mostly took care of the camera. Overall it was a very interesting day and a useful experience.

Storyline

I've started working with Articulate Storyline again, and only now do I realise the full potential it has; previously I was working with it in quite a limited way. I've followed quite a few tutorials now and have created some really interesting content and functionality. I have to continue the work on the current project, but once I've made the progress I want to make I will post some screenshots :D

Here's a little taster of what I have so far - detailed post to follow.

 

Wireframing

I was tasked with creating wireframes for the backend of a site that Andrew and Aine are working on (for which I also did use cases, as documented here: http://emermurphyworkplacement.blogspot.ie/2013/09/use-cases.html ) 

The programming team needed a starting point to develop the user management system for the site administrators. There was also to be a screen for configuration and reports. I had no information about what kind of reports would be generated so I did not design this screen. The config screen did not need to be complicated - I simply designed it with a radio button to be clicked or not, depending on whether or not the site needed to be offline. I created user management screens, first showing the list of users and then providing options within the individual users.

I used Gliffy.com to create the wireframes. This is an online wireframing tool. It has a lot of options for shapes etc but isn't always user-friendly. Seaghan wanted to use an online wireframing tool but, having used the downloadable version of the Pencil Project, I find that better. It can be very difficult to find the perfect wireframing tool, however.

Setting up for webcasting

Most of today has been spent setting up the cameras and equipment for a webcast on Friday. Seaghan can't be there so it will be myself and Andrew, so it's going to be much more of a challenge! Luckily I've helped out on the last two webcasts so that's been good experience, and Seaghan talked me through setting everything up so it should hopefully all go according to plan! So I will be communicating with the venue about the setup, and then myself, Trevor and Andrew will be going down on Thursday to set up for Friday.

We had some problems the last few times with the overload of information; updating the current bids in Wirecast sometimes causes the programme to crash as it can't cope with such speedy updates. To get around this, we are using Telestream Desktop Presenter, which will communicate with a Powerpoint presentation on which we will display the bids. This means the information isn't being logged directly to Wirecast, meaning that it uses up less resources and hopefully a smoother run of the auction. So I'm looking forward to the new challenge!