Monthly Archive for October, 2007Page 2 of 2

How to edit and present a design portfolio

Published
by
Robb Montgomery
on October 25, 2007
in Blog and robbmontgomery
. 1 Comment

Indiana University student journalist uses flickr to smartly present her visual editing skill

It seems that in this day and age designing attractive pages is not enough. You also have to know how to tightly edit your work and use the best tools for presenting your skills online.

Exhibit A: Nina Mehta, Indiana University.
Nina is graduating soon and is looking for a job. She proved to us all at SND Boston that that she is a versatile journalist. She produced many fine podcast interviews from the conference. They were so inspired I call them “NinaCasts.”

But it is how she presents her print work online that other aspring interns and job candidates could take a clue from.
She uses Flickr. Smartly.

Smart because unlike other portfolio sites, using Flickr allows me (or Nina herself!) to view and distribute her portfolio via RSS, embed in a blog (like we did here) or tag it up and spread it virally. So progressive - this girl gets it. Take a look at her stuff and tell me you don’t want to hire her.

Magazine design


News design


Corporate design


Photography


SND Intern competition


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Live Blogging the President of the U.S.

Published
by
Robb Montgomery
on October 3, 2007
in Blog and robbmontgomery
. 0 Comments

Let’s say you are reporter in a small town and POTUS decides to stop by for a visit.
You could tag along in the media van and eventually publish the details of his visit in an extra print run or you could go completely wireless and live blog the event to your loyal audience -in real time.

That’s what Tom Murse, Jr. of the New Era in Lancaster, PA decided to do when Air Force One and George W stopped into town today. Pretty much everything grinds to halt and people in town all want to know what he did, where he ate and who he talked to.

Tom says:

We sent out a broadcast e-mail to subscribers this morning letting them know we were going to be trying this.
We also invited folks to send in their own pix to our site . . .

And this is how the story now appears in reverse chronological order on his Wordpress blog.

–http://blogs.lancasteronline.com/tommurse/2007/10/03/blogging-bush/

Pretty cool. FYI, Tom was in a seminar I taught last week in Harrisburg at the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association. (Keys to building Online Communities)

Safe to say - he got something out of the day’s training.

I asked him what it took to do this.
He replied:

Dell laptop. Verizon aircard. Wordpress. Photocard handed to me by our photog.
Voila.

Thanks Tom and nice job.

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Live Blogging the President of the U.S.
lancaster, pa
October 03 — 03, 2007
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Best video compression settings for You Tube

Published
by
Robb Montgomery
on October 1, 2007
in Blog, Tutorials, Video and robbmontgomery
. 6 Comments

Let’s say you are going to be in New England making movies amidst the fall color next week . . Nice, right?

Wouldn’t it be great if that video could actually look good on You Tube - instead of how it normally does?
Below, one set of Hollywood cinema experts share their settings.

If you were at the “Web Video is not TV” workshop last week at the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association you would have learned about better video hosting options and QT settings to use for people who don’t enjoy a 100 MB upload limit or poorly compressed video. (You Tube’s limitation)
At PNA, we discussed what makes a go of good video playback on Blip and Brightcove, but first let us try to see if we can improve for the old You Tube.

The LA Final Cut Pro Users Group has a tutorial.
If your boss demands to see it on You Tube these Quicktime compression settings are supposed to you get the most of your crisp High-Def clips without cringing. Let’s give it a test drive.

Couple of key thoughts here from the LA filmmakers. Don’t make your output size any larger than 320 wide and use the highest data rate to get your file as close to the 100 MB limit as possible. That means a new workflow for a lot of us who have been used to “setting it 480 and forgettting it” . . let us see if it is worth it.

Here are their settings.

General Purpose Settings - Video up to 6 minutes in length

  • H.264 video codec set to 2000Kbits/sec (2Mbits/sec or 250KBytes/sec)
  • 320×240 video size (deinterlaced or simply use one field)
  • Mono audio with AAC codec at 64 Kbit/sec (or 128 Kbit/sec for stereo)
  • Recommended Sample Rate
  • Best Encoding Quality

In the “Video Options” select Main Profile and Best Quality (Multi-pass).

These settings will be fine up to 800 Mbits aka 100 MBytes.
At the proposed settings, any file shorter than 6 minutes and 15 seconds will be within YouTube’s 100MB per upload limit.

To calculate the ideal setting for videos longer than this, visit the LA FCP group Web site.

BEFORE


This version was output last year using the QT PRo preset “Save as . . . Movie for iPod.”
it made a 5.5 MB .m4v file.

AFTER


This version was saved today using high data rate settings out of QT PRO.
The file size is 14 MB.

Hmm. I respect their thinking, but I just have to ask . . . How does that quality compare to a 4.7 MB version of the file (output at my usual 480 pixels wide/650k data rate) dropped on . . .

Blip.tv

Video thumbnail. Click to play.
Click To Play


Yep. That’s what I thought.

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