Group Leadership Project-Overview to Google Docs

For our project, our group decided to do video tutorial of the various applications available through Google Docs. This would allow access through an easy medium like YouTube, and would allow people to see our steps in action. In creating our tutorial, we had decided that each member would take an application from Google and create a video segment that we would then piece together with transitions. I am not sure about the others, but creating the video segment was ridiculously easy.  I used screencast-o-matic.com to record my screencast. My two favorite features about this site are 1) You do not have to create an account to use it (unusual for free programs) and 2) It has an auto-adjust feature for your microphone.

I did have trouble with the various video formats that I could save to. The .avi format would not encode. I could save the .flv file, but Windows Movie Maker Live would not work with the file format. That left me with .mp4.

 I then elected to piece the various video segments from team members together in Windows Movie Maker Live.

I created transition images and then simply uploaded the video files that others had sent to me, also in .mp4 format. Again, no sweat. But, the completed product had several issues. First, in movie maker live there is no way (that I know of) to pull out the audio to edit it, so we the user of our video would have had to adjust their volume while watching. 2) We were VERY long on the time, and YouTube has a 15 minute limit 3) The quality of the video was fine in Movie Maker, but any way that I 'exported' it, the visual quality dropped noticeably. I tried converting the files to other formats and then bringing them into Movie Maker, but that only seemed to make it worse-I believe this is essentially the "copy of a copy" issue. I also download another video editing program but was greeted with the same results.

Long story short, the final product was not bad, but not what we had hoped for.

In order for my team mates to see the completed video, I broke them into two segments and uploaded them to YouTube. After contacting Susan Wright, our instructor, we needed to pull the time back to ten minutes. We decided to keep the introduction and the overview of Google Documents since many of the features of Documents are found in the other applications, and then post the original two segments here.

Here is our shortened, official final product

Here is the original segments: Segment One 
                                             Segment Two
All in all, this was not a bad experience, but I certainly learned a lot. In the future, I would have one person do all the recording in one program that they can publish from in a format that is not .mp4. For instance, you can publish to YouTube from screencast-o-matic, but there is no way to piece videos together and then post. If I was going to do a lot of this sort of thing, I would definitely being doing some more reading online about what are the best programs. Much of what I read about Movie Maker Live helped me to understand that it is an ok "get the job done" program, but that a true video editing program is the way to go, and that .mp4 is not always that best file format.