Facing the currently unknown

The Flip rules again

As many of you know, I love my Flip ultra video camera. It's easy to use and of a good quality, especially for online work. But my love of it was accentuated even more yesterday when for the first time in ages I used my own "posh" HD video camera. I spent 3 hours converting the files, for no obvious gain compared to using the Flip. It really is THAT good.

Watch out soon for the video of the fairytrale my year 10s wrote and performed yesterday- I'm a proud man!!

Zamzar

I've tried playing around with sites such as You Tube and Teachers Tube a fair bit recently, but always got frustrated with the difficulties of using the materials in the classroom. I don't have an internet connection in my room (grrrrrrrrr, one of my hates), so I've been using Keepvid to save videos to my computer, and then playing them on the dedicated FLV player. However, the issue with that is that...

a) the FLV player is ridiculously stubborn and sometimes refuses to work properly

b) the player always comes up immensely small, leading to craned neck syndrome- never positive!!

So I was delighted when I was told about Zamzar recently at a course held by the fascinating Francisco Villatoro. It's not only perfect for things like videos, allowing you to copy in any URL to save the file from it, but is also capable of converting pretty much any type of file into anything else- and all completely free.

The service simply e-mails you a link from where you can download the converted file- very very easy and quick, even on my irritatingly slow laptop.

So hurrah, now I just have a huge file packed with .avis which I can use whenever I want, yippee!!