Thing 9: Video

I was awfully nervous getting started on Thing 9.  I was fearful of having to make a personal screen appearance because cameras and I don't really get on all that well.  When it turned out that screen stardom was not a requirement I began to get quite excited.  I think videos are a great way of sharing information.  It's much easier to absorb how to do something when you can see it done in front of you rather than trying to work it out by reading a manual.  Even instructions for something simple like adding page numbers to a Word document can be enough to put you in a coma: "Double-click the header or the footer area which opens the Design tab under Header & Footer tools.  To place your page number in the centre, click Insert Alignment Tab in the Position group of the Design tab, click Center, and then click OK."  Snore!

Information Overload

I think video is also a great option for archives as an easy and effective way of promoting collections, highlighting unique items or sharing information about exhibitions and other events.  OK, easy is perhaps not where it's at, at least not after my experience!  I couldn't come up with any ideas as to what to do for a screencast so in a moment of insanity I decided to do a little taster to promote our online project It's a Long Way to Tipperary - an Irish Story of the Great War.  My plan was to create a short PowerPoint presentation, then let that run on my monitor screen and capture it with one of the the recommended free softwares.  Not strictly speaking a screencast but close enough.

A piece of cake, right?  Wrong!  Putting the PowerPoint presentation together was easy but when I began experimenting with recording options things got sticky.  I started with Jing but this required registration so I gave that a quick miss.  I moved on to Screencast-O-Matic which initially I thought was great as the first time you use it you don't need to sign in or anything, you just click 'record' and you're good to go - well, sort of.  However, the end result was disappointing.  Firstly, Screencast-O-Matic adds a logo to the bottom left hand corner of the recording which may not be suitable or appropriate for some purposes; it can also be a bit irritating as the logo is quite prominent and tends to draw the eye to it.  Secondly, the basic version doesn't seem to give the best possible quality of screen capture, and with sound it's even worse because in my case it changed a stereo recording into mono which effectively ruined it.  Finally, once you've used it once it won't allow you to have a second go unless you create an account, which I was loathe to do.

Having fiddled around with the recording for the best part of two days my brother pointed out that PowerPoint actually allows you to save your presentation as a video file.  Duh!  It turned out to be really easy to use and gives a near-perfect result.  So after three days of muttering under my breath I was finally ready to upload my video to YouTube.  Thankfully that was the easiest bit of the exercise!  As I am no Stephen Spielberg I have left the video unlisted but anyone interested in viewing it can do so at  https://youtu.be/1UayqHDrKHQ.

As a summary, I think video is a brilliant tool for archives albeit potentially a time consuming one. For anybody wanting to showcase collections or to demonstrate something for which using screencast is not sufficient I would  highly recommend experimenting with PowerPoint as a video tool, it's really well worth a go.