JISC Digital Media Blog Archive
July 2009

And the winner is…

Posted by Steve Hull on Monday 27 July 2009 at 5:13pm
Tags: news | training | video

The first two institutions have been chosen for JISC Ditital Media’s new Video Assist programme.

The University of Nottingham applied for support in the creation of video materials for their Master’s degree in Contaminated Land Management, while Bournville College’s application concerned the production of a video introduction to their Learning Resources Centre.  Each institution will receive 4 days’ worth of bespoke consultation, including on-site supervision during the production phase of their projects.

A number of excellent proposals were received for Video Assist, but unfortunately only two could be chosen.  However, there is a second round coming up very soon.  The deadline for applications for the next Video Assist is the 20th of November.  The two institutions selected from this round will receive their Video Assist support between January and April of next year, and all FE and HE institutions in the UK are invited to apply.  For further information please see the Video Assist pages on our website.

JISC Digital Media at DIVERSE ‘09

Posted by JISC Digital Media on Thursday 23 July 2009 at 11:56am
Tags: composition | equipment | lighting | microphones | news | tripod | video

Steve Hull, one of JISC Digital Media’s Technical Support Officers for moving images, gave a talk at this year’s DIVERSE conference in Aberystwyth on the 25th of June.

Steve’s presentation was titled Improving the Quality of Visual Media in Education or Anyone Can Make a Movie! In it, he spoke about how, by paying attention to a few simple points, it is possible for non-professionals to make quite presentable videos using the simplest equipment.  As with almost all of the presentations at DIVERSE, Steve’s talk was recorded.

Everyone had a wonderful time at DIVERSE, a conference dedicated to the use of video in education.  The small, friendly crowd, meeting in a beautiful part of Wales—with uncharacteristically lovely weather—spent the three days talking, brainstorming and getting inspired about this exciting area of research.  Next year’s conference is at the University of Southern Maine in the US and should prove to be just as beneficial to all attending.

A caveat about the recording: unfortunately, the sound quality of the video clips that were played is very poor.  We have, however, re-rendered the clips for the JISC Digital Media website and present them herewith.

A further caveat if you’re looking at the clips without seeing the presentation: the first one is intentionally horrible.  With each successive clip we remove some of the problems of the first clip until by clip 5 we achieve something which, while not brilliant, is nonetheless acceptable and usable.

Clip 1 - doing everything wrong

Use this link if you would prefer to download the clip or if our video player is not showing

Clip 2 - now we can see and hear and get a bit of useful visual information

Use this link if you would prefer to download the clip or if our video player is not showing

Clip 3 - at last, a tripod - and no CRT monitor

Use this link if you would prefer to download the clip or if our video player is not showing

Clip 4 - using better interviewing techniques

Use this link if you would prefer to download the clip or if our video player is not showing

Clip 5 - after a little editing

Use this link if you would prefer to download the clip or if our video player is not showing

New digital restoration course among autumn training dates

Posted by Antony Theobald on Wednesday 22 July 2009 at 1:20pm
Tags: analogue collections | audio editing | cameras | colour management | digital collections | digitisation | file formats | finding images | image editing | lighting | metadata | microphones | news | photography | photoshop | resolution | restoration | software | sound recordings | staff training | teaching | training | video | vle

The keen-eyed among you will have already noticed we have just released details of our new training programme for September to December.

In addition to our July and August dates, we now have the following courses scheduled - note the brand new Digital Media Restoration course, and look out for an announcement soon on more new video and audio courses…

• Audio Production: Recording Lectures, Seminars, Interviews and Podcasts - 09 September 2009 or 10 November 2009
• Essential Techniques in Digital Image Capture - 28 July 2009
• Advanced Techniques in Digital Image Capture - 29 July 2009
• Using Digital Media in VLEs - 04 November 2009
• Digitising Analogue Video Recordings - 06 October 2009 or 11 November 2009
• Introduction to Image Metadata - 10 September 2009 or 09 December 2009
• Building a Departmental Image Collection - 07 October 2009
• Finding Free-to-Use Images Online - 13 October 2009
• Scanning with the CLA Licence - 14 October 2009
• Digital Photography - Getting started with your SLR - 27 October 2009
• Digital Photography - Taking Control of your SLR - 28 October 2009
• Colour Management - 18 November 2009
• Essential Photoshop Skills - 01 December 2009
• Digital Media Restoration - 02 December 2009

For full details on each course, please visit our Training page.

Video: 1978 Folk Arts Conference, State Library and Archives of Florida on Flickr

Zoom with a view - video with an audio bias

Posted by Gavin Brockis on Wednesday 22 July 2009 at 12:08pm
Tags: cameras | equipment | podcasts | sound recordings | video

The new Zoom Q3 audio/video recorder offers simple video, combined with high quality stereo audio capture.

Pro-Audio manufacturer Zoom have us excited with the recent release of their new stablemate for their H4n portable audio recorder, in the form of the Q3 - a similarly high quality portable stereo recorder, but with the major difference of built-in video capture.

Bearing a striking resemblance to the excellent little Flip camera - a fantastically user-friendly device for capturing simple video - but sporting a serious-looking microphone above the lens, the Q3  features the same X/Y stereo microphones as the H4n. This allows the ability to record in true stereo to mp3 at a variety of bitrates, or to uncompressed better-than-CD-quality wav - up to 48kHz sampling rate at 24 bit - alongside mpeg-4 video, and at full 96kHz 24-bit quality in audio-only mode.

Whereas many video cameras suffer from poor sound, the intention here is clearly to put audio first. While the resolution of the camera is limited to 640x480 pixels - ideal for internet delivery, but definitely not to be considered high definition - the audio components and resolution are unquestionably capable of delivering a professional result, if our experience of the H4 is anything to go by. It’s very welcome to see a recorder with a more balanced approach to video and audio quality, and at what promises to be a very accessible price.

Given that much of the ‘meat’ can be contained in the audio part of a presentation, lecture, seminar etc, it seems sensible to trade off a little in video resolution to make significant improvements in sound quality - especially if delivery via the internet, be that by VLE, YouTube or podcast, is anticipated - and we expect to see a lot of these in use throughout the education sector before too long. Perfect for audio and video podcasting and informal video/audio capture in a wide range of conditions, the Q3 could have been (and possibly was) designed with education content creation in mind. For those happy with the video functionality of the Flip, but looking for better sound, it will be very interesting indeed.

Pocket audio toolbox

Posted by Gavin Brockis on Monday 20 July 2009 at 2:29pm
Tags: mobile | news | sound recordings

We have a new advice document now online, looking at using your mobile phone as a portable audio recorder:

Using a Mobile Phone as an Audio Recorder

Many mobiles now have facilities for recording sound through their microphones and transferring them to computer, or even uploading straight to the web. As a tool for making simple recordings and capturing unforeseen audio moments the everyday mobile phone has enormous potential, and this new document looks at how and why you might do this in an educational context.

We also look at what to expect in terms of sound quality and functionality, and how to start incorporating audio from your mobile into teaching, learning and research.

Backing up your iPhone/touch

Posted by Zak Mensah on Wednesday 15 July 2009 at 2:00pm
Tags: e-learning | storage | workflow

Backing up is the first thing that I think about once I have any new data on a new device.

It’s more important to me than the shinest of shiny features of the service/device that I am using. It should be for you.

Seeing as a number of the community are thinking about or just starting to use Apple iPhone/iPod touch for teaching and learning, let’s cover our bases and learn how to backup the devices before they fallover/corrupt/go to a happier place.

Apple provide an indepth article on backing up your iPhone and iPod touch. I found this link via Daring Fireball which is great for all news Apple-related.

Newly updated Flickr advice

Posted by Antony Theobald on Tuesday 14 July 2009 at 9:00am
Tags: finding images | flickr | news | photo sharing | photographs

We’ve just released a completely updated advice document on using Flickr to find images.

Finding Images on Flickr looks at the pros and cons of using the hugely popular photo sharing site as a source of images.

Photo by Mark Strozier on Flickr - used under a Creative Commons licence

Illustrated throughout with Flickr images that have been cleared for use under Creative Commons licenses, the document discusses the best ways of finding appropriate images to use for educational activities including teaching, research and business and community engagement (BCE), while pointing out some of the pitfalls you can avoid.

*NEW* advice on recording telephone conversations

Posted by Gavin Brockis on Monday 13 July 2009 at 5:14pm
Tags: news | sound recordings

We’ve just published a new advice document about the practice and legalities of recording telephone conversations for oral history and research purposes.

Hot on the heels of Joel’s guide to Recording Skype Calls is another new advice document relating to Recording Telephone Conversations. This covers the simple hardware you need to be able to feed both sides of a conventional ‘land line’ telephone call into your recording system, and the related audio considerations.

It also covers the basic legal requirements for making these recordings, with links to further legal resources.

JISC Digital Content Conference

Posted by Stephen Gray on Monday 13 July 2009 at 3:47pm
Tags: digital collections | event | news

June 30th saw the JISC Digital Content Conference hosted at the Cotswold Water Park.

The conference was a large affair with multiple themed strands expertly choreographed over two days. JISC Digital Media presented a vision of digital media in a pedagogical context under the umbrella of the ‘Content in Education’ strand. Other strands included ‘Content Development’ and ‘Managing Content’. These themes seemed a little diverse at first, but it soon became apparent that we had been covering an overlapping and increasingly important issue: user engagement.

In the plenary sessions too, high profile speakers (for instance Robert Miller of the Internet Archive and Nick Poole of the Collection’s Trust) asked the same kind of question: who is the user of all this digital stuff and just what are they doing with it?

Conferences generate buzz words and this conference was no different: ‘crowd sourcing; was discussed in every session. The idea is that the user is not longer a passive receptacle but an active partner and contributor to a digital collection.

The Galaxy Zoo project is built upon the statistical analysis of galaxies, contributed by millions of dedicated users. The First World War Archive presents informal family stories relating to the Great War. Both projects are highly successful examples of crowd sourcing.

The idea of the productive user is fairly straightforward but the implementation can be fraught. The team from the Old Bailey Proceedings digitisation project warned of the confusion that can result from taking an open approach to user contributions. Without strong guidance the user can and does upload anything or nothing. The conference also looked at possible relationships between digital content collections both nationally and internationally.

In a rapidly evolving environment (technologically, financially, legally and politically) it was the nature of the changing relationship that seemed to dominate proceedings, while matters such as collection building or digitisation took a back seat. The tentative verdict seemed to be that building or sustaining a valuable digital collection using young Web 2.0 technologies was both positive and inevitable, but some casualties would be unavoidable. Learning valuable lessons from others by the sharing of direct personal experience underlined both the need for cautious crowd souring and the value of the conference itself.

New DACS licence for museums and heritage organisations in the pipeline

Posted by Dave Kilbey on Thursday 09 July 2009 at 1:22pm
Tags: copyright | digitisation

On Thursday 2nd July I attended a Museums Copyright Group meeting at which John Robinson, Director of Legal and International at DACS, presented a proposal for a new Museums and Heritage Copyright Licence.

Basis for the licence

As an institution or individual, digitising works for educational use can be a prohibitively expensive and time consuming process in terms of clearing rights.  And what of works where the rights holder can’t be traced, so called orphan works?

There is the feeling generally that due diligence may not provide an adequate defence given the potential financial and reputational risk involved with using works with unidentified copyright status.

A solution?

For the Museums and Heritage sector a solution may be on the horizon.  Within the new licence proposed by DACS (Design and Artists Copyright Society), institutions within remit would be able to:

• Digitise analogue resources and provide access to digital copies in the manner specified below
• Digitise large numbers of items

Key benefits of using the licence will be the ability to:

• Greatly reduce the administrative burden involved with tracing rights holders when digitising works
• Obtain legal certainty (indemnity) over copied works, even for orphan works and works from countries without a reciprocal copyright agreement.

Included in the scope of the licence are objects such as: paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photos, design objects and models.  It is envisaged that the digital copies made can be disseminated via; vodcasts, educational packs, interactive displays, traditional lecture materials, websites and so on.  Importantly, the licence will not indemnify for the use of digitised copies in publications (it has yet to be established whether non-commercial publications are included in this), e-books and any advertising/marketing uses.

Additional features of the proposed licence include:

• The customer will pay for the digitisation of an object not for the number of times the object is copied.
• Payment will be made in advance to cover the number of digital objects required.

As with other collective licences there will be the necessity to report on the type and number of works copied/made available.  This is to enable DACS to provide appropriate payments to the artists involved.  There will also be the possibility of institutional auditing.

Cost of the licence

The precise cost of the licence is yet to be established.  However, the per-item price of digitising was indicated to be in the region of £3-4.

Finishing touches

The main body of work regarding the licence has been done.  However, there are still many details left to be decided upon and input from museums was encouraged, particularly regarding how information on artists can be recorded and passed on to DACS (and vice versa).  Updates will be posted as and when further information becomes available.

Hanging on the Telephone

Posted by Joel Eaton on Tuesday 07 July 2009 at 4:22pm
Tags: news | software | sound recordings

With the rising popularity of Skype and other VOIP tools, recording calls is a great way of creating resources, for example, long distance interviews or even preparing assessment material for language courses.

A new step-by-step guide on how to record Skype calls using free software is now available.

The transforming user

Posted by Stephen Gray on Thursday 02 July 2009 at 4:57pm
Tags: delivery | digital collections | event

Last week the BBC hosted the presentation of the work of SEMEDIA (Search Environments for Media), a project co-funded by the European Union. SEMEDIA are a group of research institutes both private and public, who have taken on the challenge of meeting user needs.

Big names like Yahoo! and BBC Research and Development have teamed up with less well known partners such as production house Smoke & Mirrors to enable the digital collection user to do whatever s/he wants to do, and do it better. The material in question happens to be digital video, but the problems faced by the team would be familiar to images, digital audio, and even e-journal collections.

SEMEDIA have attempted to draw an accurate portrait of just who the user is (difficult task) and what they want to do with this stuff (very difficult task). Recognising the complex nature of any community of users, the team hasn’t put together a one-size-fits all solution, rather it has developed a number of different software tools, which share common features.

These tools have been pitched differently, some aimed at the production industry, some at the educational sector but interestingly the work of SEMEDIA suggests that all user communities have overlapping needs.

One focus has been on assisting the user to find digital video and then locate useful sequences within it. The size of this task can’t be overestimated (think of a digital video as 25 digital photographs per second and you can see why, a 4 minute clip could easily consist of 6000 discreet images). Importantly though, contextual metadata which lends meaning to each video section sequence should be plentiful, easily accessed and accurate.

Several of the partners (Yahoo! for instance) have recruited users to generate this metadata for them. They have run trials using a competitive ‘Video Tagging Game’ which sees competitors pitting their wits against one another in order to generate the highest number and most accurate of tags. In terms of descriptive data the results seem very promising. Other partners have developed ways to search by colour an esoteric but surprisingly useful feature (especially for sporting footage it seems!).

Evolving user demands, coupled with maturing Web 2.0 tools are beginning to open up digital collections and transform the ‘user’ into the ‘collaborator’ who creates or changes content and then folds it back into the collection. While there is still some question about what ‘making use’ of a digital collection will mean five years from now, it seems the SEMEDIA approach is a good one: develop several options and let the crowd decide. For more information see the SEMEDIA website.

Musical contour search engine

Posted by Steve Hull on Thursday 02 July 2009 at 10:47am
Tags: finding audio | music

The wonderful music site Musipedia has a music search facility which gives you a number of different ways of specifying the melody you want to identify.

Most interesting is the musical contour search, a method based on something called the Parsons code of a melody.  Using this system, you don’t have to be able to read music, you don’t even have to know the rhythm of the melody: all you need to know is whether each successive note in the melody is higher, lower or the same as the previous one.  For example, the opening bar of Beethoven’s 5th symphony would have the Parsons code *RRD, where the asterisk is a placeholder for the first note, the two Rs indicate that the second note is the same as the first and the third the same again and the final D indicates that the fourth note is lower than the third.

It doesn’t, however, find Beethoven, because it’s not long enough.  Let’s go a bit further, then, and enter *rrdurrdurrdurrdurrd.  Sure enough, Beethoven comes out on top—but there are a few other matches as well, including a song from HMS Pinafore.

How about the “Goin’ Home” theme from Dvořák’s 9th symphony (“From the New World”): *urddduuudduurddduuddr gets it right away, though it also brings up (rather inaccurately) Hony Tonk Women.  Any other connections  between wildly different musical genres?  Typing *dudududdduuuduuu gives both Beethoven’s Für Elise and Sympathy for the Devil (what is it about the Stones?).  The system isn’t always accurate and seems to work better for classical melodies, but it’s still a very welcome tool.