Technical Setup Assignments

Below are two assignments created by Vika Zafrin, Digital Scholarship Librarian. The first one walks you through creating test audio and video files, and the other one shows you how to upload them to this website.

Assignment: Creating Your First Audio and Video

These instructions were written using Mac OS and iOS. Things should be more or less the same in Windows and Android. If you have trouble, do a web search for the task you’re trying to do, the application name, and Windows (for example, compress video VLC windows 10). If you don’t find any useful information, contact Vika as per below.

  1. Create an audio clip using Audition CC
    1. Start Audition CC
    2. Go to the File menu -> New -> Audio File; give your new file the name [yourBUuserName]_audiotest (for example, jsmith_audiotest) and click OK.
    3. Decide what you’ll be recording — a song, a poem, just yourself talking.
    4. Click the red record button and begin recording. When you make sound, you should see green sound markings on the black background. Make the clip about 30 seconds long, give or take. Click the square Stop button when you’re done.
    5. Go to File -> Save As, and change the format to .wav
      1. Make note of the location where this is being saved; change the location if you like
      2. Your ~30sec file could be as large as 15MB or more. This will be the archival (uncompressed) version of your test “interview.”
    6. Go to File -> Save As again, and this time save as .mp3
      1. Click the Change button next to Format Settings, and select a bitrate of 128 Kbps
      2. Your ~30sec file shouldn’t be more than about 500Kb to 1MB, though it’s hard to tell in advance. If the reduction in size is not drastic compared to the .wav file, you might check in with Vika.
  2. Create a video clip using Adobe Premiere Clip
    1. Start up Adobe Clip on your phone; you should see a blank My Projects section
    2. Click the plus sign to create a project. Choose the “Take a Photo or Video” option. Give Adobe Clip access to your camera and microphone.
    3. Begin recording video in landscape mode. For this class, all videos you record should be in landscape mode.
      1. You may keep your camera fairly stable, to replicate (more or less) what will happen in an interview. Narrate something over your recording, which should be about 30 seconds long. Once you’ve finished recording, click “Use video.”
    4. THIS PART IS VERY IMPORTANT. In the Choose Project Type screen, you MUST choose the Freeform option. If you choose the Automatic option, you’ll lose control of the clip you end up with, and will have to start again. Most certainly don’t make this mistake when you’re recording a real interview.
    5. Once you’ve chosen Freeform, you’ll be given a chance to trim your clip. Don’t do that at this point. Go to Project Settings instead (the gear icon up top), turn off Photo Motion, and click Done.
    6. Now make sure that only one clip is showing on the bottom, about 30 seconds long, and that it’s selected. Click the Share button up top (a box with an up arrow) and choose “Save to Creative Cloud.” Be patient while the video is prepared and saved. Once you see the “Video Saved” message, click OK.
  3. Check your video clip for completeness and quality, and then save a compressed copy
    1. On your laptop, find your Creative Cloud Files folder. On a Mac, that’s inside your main user/home folder. In this folder, should be a Premiere Clip subfolder. In that one, you’ll see your video as an .mp4 file, which will be named with a date and time stamp. The size of a ~30sec video file will vary heavily depending on how much panning you did (how many background pixels changed). Expect to see a file somewhere between 15MB and 50MB. Rename that file [yourBUuserName]_videotest.mp4 (for example, jsmith_videotest.mp4).
    2. Start up VLC and open the .mp4 file in it. Play through the video to make sure it’s what you want. Once the play-through ends, you’ll see a VLC playlist window.
    3. Go to the File menu -> Convert/Stream
      1. Drop your video file into the appropriate area of the Convert/Stream window, or just open it using the “Open media…” button
      2. Your original video was likely a lot larger than we’ll need for streaming in the site. Let’s shrink the compressed version down a bit.
    4. In the Choose Profile section, click Customize and go to the Video Codec tab. Under Resolution, in the Width field, enter 500. This will create a video that’s 500 pixels wide; the software will assign height automatically to keep the proportions correct.
    5. In the Choose Destination section, click Browse, make sure you’re saving it in the Premiere Clip folder, and make sure that the filename is the same but the extension is different (jsmith_videotest.m4v). Click Save twice.
    6. You’ll see a progress bar, as if a file is playing — but nothing will be playing. That is an indicator of the conversion progress. Wait until the process completes. You will notice that it takes a while; for an hour-long video, you’ll want to leave your computer alone and go do something else while the conversion takes place. You could also do something else on your computer, but then the conversion will take slightly longer.
    7. The resulting .m4v file should be much smaller than the original — maybe 5% or less of the original size.

Assignment: Upload Audio and Video to Russian Chat

You’ll be uploading only the compressed files to the Russian Chat WordPress website.

  1. Log in at this address (need link)
  2. On the left side, go to Media -> Add New
  3. Drag your compressed file (.mp3 or .m4v) to the “Drop files here” part of the window. If that doesn’t work, upload via the Select Files button

And you’re done.

What will you do with the archival videos? Stay tuned; we’re working on this.

Naming Conventions for Real Interview Files

Please name them according to the following naming convention: interviewee’s first initial and last name, your first initial and last name, and the date in the YYYYMMDD format. The elements of the file name should be separated by underscores. For example:

mgorbachev_jsmith_20190103.mp4
mgorbachev_jsmith_20190103.m4v
araikin_jsmith_20190204.wav
araikin_jsmith_20190204.mp3

Questions?

If you have trouble with any of the installations, please contact the IT Help Center (353-HELP or open a ticket here).

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