‘Tis the season for converters, fa la la la la la la la la

When I recorded the CCBC workshop we hosted on April 23rd, I had no idea I was going to have such trouble posting it online for people to view. The Sony Handycam I purchased worked great, as did the wireless microphone system that goes with it, so that wasn’t the problem. (Except for my amateurish, nausea-inspiring mis-mastery of the controls throughout the recording!)

The problem came when I tried to import the recording into Camtasia or Windows Movie Maker. I could view the file just fine in Windows Media Player, but Camtasia wouldn’t load it at all and Windows Movie Maker gave me the audio but not the video. After much searching and fussing about I finally tried downloading a video converter (WM Converter to be specific) to see if the format was the problem. Sure enough! Once I converted the file to .avi both programs imported the video swimmingly and I could move on to edit the videos. (Why both programs won’t work with mpeg-2 files is beyond me! I have to check the camcorder’s documentation to see if I can change the recording format and fix that problem. I don’t want to have to convert every video I create or have to teach our members how to do this with their projects!)

So I thought the worst was over. But no. One more converter required. I pulled in some license-free music from CCMixter for some intro music, but couldn’t edit it to shorten it or add fade ins or fade outs. Turns out Camtasia doesn’t like mp3 files either, so I had to download an audio converter (Free MP3 Wma Converter to be precise) to convert it to a .wav file. Everything worked fine after that, but I’m thinking how the heck am I going to provide training on all the converting I’m having to do?!

After all this, I STILL don’t have an end product I can post on the web. It appears that the conversion process makes the video kinda funky – the speaker’s lips don’t match the audio, so it’s a bit like watching a foreign film that has been dubbed over in English. So! I’m still plugging away on this project, trying to figure things out, and trying to decide if this is anything I can ever train our members on. If I didn’t want to edit the recording, it would be no problem, just load and go, but I suspect that we’ll want to edit projects and so will figure this out.

I’m looking forward to working on podcasts instead and hope they’ll be easier!