Advanced Web Design

Instructions for Streaming Media Project: Self-Interview

1. You are going to interview yourself for our on-line publication. In your interview, you will want to reveal something about yourself in relation to your work as a Web artist/designer. In a sense, your portraying yourself through your telematic identity. Determine what that is, in other words, your relationship to the medium. Are you an idealist? Cynic? Do you think the Web is a revolutionary medium? Are you ambivalent? Your self-interview is an opportunity to express your telematic aspirations.
2. Carefully script your self-interview in advance. It should be no longer than 1 minute. Rehearse your script before shooting because you want to minimize editing.
3. Record or videotape your media material. You can check out a DV video camera from the A/V desk. I'll also bring in my camera. Since we don't have much hard drive storage, and since most of you do not have experience editing video, you need to shoot your material so that it requires very little, if any post production work.
4. Once you have shot your video, connect the camera to the computer either through Fiercer or through the video input jacks. Open iMovie, be sure there is a video signal, and then locate the footage you want to digitize, and record.
5. Editing should be minimal. You will probably want to make sure the clip has a fade in and fade out (video and audio).
6. Export to Web movie. This will give you a small dimension and high compression for transferring to the Web.
7. Import video into RealProducer. Determine settings for how the clip will stream: bandwidth (i.e., 56K, Lan); sound and video quality; cropping if necessary, etc.
8. You can either use the RealProducer "Wizard" for creating an html document that will play the video (this can be tricky with our setup), or you can create your own metafile for simple playback. The file you create needs to have the ".rm" suffix and should look something like myvideofile.rm. We are using my realserver in my studio, which doesn't have ftp capability, so you will have to give me your .rm files and I will load them when I get home. Your video won't play online until I do this, but it should work offline in the meantime.
9. You then create a metafile, which is a text file, made with simpletext, that only contains the URL to the RealServer, i.e., rtsp://www.telemusic.org/myvideofile.rm. The metafile needs to have a ".ra" suffix, something like myvideofile.ra, and should reside in your own web space.
10. You can then create a link to the metafile (myvideofile.ra) from your website. If all is working, your webpage opens the metafile, which then opens the realvideo player, which then plays your video. Got that?
11. Go back to drawing on paper...