(About 1,440 words)

Tips for Adding Audio and Video (for Free) to Your User Group Web Site
By Phil Shapiro, member of the Capital PC User Group, Virginia Macintosh Users Group, Washington Apple Pi, Young Hackers and Scholars Libre Users Group

When people visit your user group web site, almost all of them want to know the answer to two questions:

Who are these people?
What do they care about?

You can try answering these questions with words and pictures. That sort of works. Or you can add audio and video to your user group web site, completely free of charge using the Internet Archive (http://www.archive.org), and bring your club to life in whole new ways.

I've been experimenting with this in the Virginia Macintosh Users Group and have learned some things worth passing along. You can view the video I uploaded at http://www.archive.org/details/vmugtestimonials2 . Now I'll explain how I created and uploaded it.

A few years ago I carried my digital camcorder, tripod and some lighting to a VMUG meeting. We meet in the large library of a middle school, so I set up my camcorder in a side area of the library. During the meeting I discretely went around the room asking folks if they wanted to say a few words on camera in support of the club. This was entirely spontaneous and unrehearsed, so the club could best collect people's genuine sentiments.

It didn't take much time or effort to gather these short testimonials. I then edited these testimonials together in iMovie and created an MPEG-1 file from them via the Share option in the File menu of iMovie. (To create an MPEG-1 file you need to have Roxio Toast, a commercial program, installed on your Mac.) It's useful to note that the file name suffix of MPEG-1 is .mpg

MPEG-1 files can be viewed by Macintosh, Windows and Linux users. These files are admittedly a bit on the large size in terms of megabytes per minute of video. Each minute of MPEG-1 video is 10 megabytes. But their universal viewability is a great attribute.

I uploaded this 9-minute (87 megabyte) file to the Internet Archive. The process of uploading video to the Internet Archive is fairly simple, but let me explain the steps anyway. First you need to create an account for yourself on the Internet Archive. It's free and takes just a few steps. 

Then you need to upload your video file or files. I used the popular Fetch FTP (file transfer protocol) program for Macintosh computers. CyberDuck (free) works equally well. On the Windows side of things, SmartFTP is the best free FTP programs I know of.

After logging in to your Internet Archive account, the first step is to create a folder (subdirectory) for each video (or audio) file. The folder name needs to be almost identical to the file name. So if you want to upload the file named vmugtestimonials2.mpg your folder name should be vmugtestimonials2. (without the period at the end). Next you open the folder you've created (by double clicking on it) and
drop the file you want to upload into that folder. The upload process can take a while, even if you have a high speed Internet connection. A rough rule of thumb is that you can upload about 1 to 3 megabytes per minute with most DSL and cable modem accounts. Using a Verizon FIOS (fiber optic) account, you can upload about 12 to 15 megabytes/min.

After the file has been uploaded, you need to wait about 6 to 8 hours before the file is "released." (There are people at the Internet Archive that check to make sure the file was safely received at their side and is not inappropriate.)

The final step is to "Import" the file into the Internet Archive, giving it a detailed file description and including other relevant information, such as who produced it and what the duration of the file is. 

You can also choose which Creative Commons license you would like for this file, or whether you'd like to donate your file to the public domain.  While Creative Commons licenses are a wonderful invention, donating your file to the public domain might be the most sensible (and least complicated) way to proceed.

After you've imported your file into the Internet Archive, you need to wait just a bit longer (usually just a few hours -- or less), and then your file will be available for any and all to view -- in perpetuity. (Roughly until when the sun blows up.)

Here's the part you're going to like a lot. If you upload MPEG-1 files to the Internet Archive, and if the file has a suffix of .mpg, then the Internet Archive automatically creates 2 smaller file size versions of this video in MPEG-4 format. One of these smaller sizes is suitable for dial-up users -- although it will admittedly look and sound rather
choppy.

The other MPEG-4 version of the file could be viewed by dial-up users with a lot of patience. It takes roughly 5 minutes for a dial-up user to receive one megabyte of downloads, so if your MPEG-4 file is 12 megabytes in file size, a dial-up user could view that file after waiting for about an hour.

Which brings up the point that you probably want to keep your video files less than 10 minutes in duration. Since the Internet Archive is free and gives unlimited storage, you can upload lots of 10 minute videos. The reason to keep files short is that sometimes you can run into synch (synchronization) issues where the audio of the video is not matched up with the lips of the people speaking in the video -- or of the other actions shown in the video. Synch problems seem to crop up most often in the dial-up MPEG-4 files, in my experience.

Suppose you didn't have easy access to a digital camcorder and you wanted to create some video testimonials for your computer user group. Is there any way of doing so? Sure. You can create video files using still digital photos accompanied by audio files. The tool I like best for this is iMovie, the free video editing software that ships with all new Macs. You can likely also use Windows Moviemaker 2, which ships for free with
Windows XP computers.  

In terms of capturing audio, you can use any laptop and the free Audacity audio recording and editing software. http://audacity.sourceforge.net

Or you might want to use a portable digital recorder device. My podcasting friends tell me they like the digital recorders produced by Olympus. The advantage of a portable digital recorder is that you more easily capture that moment when someone has something positive to say at a user group meeting. Naturally, you want to be careful not to disrupt the flow of the meeting, so it might be best to take the person aside during a break – or corner them after the meeting and ask them if they would mind repeating a
statement -- they made in the meeting (or to offer an on-the-spot testimonial.)

Explain what you're going to be using the testimonials for. Most people will gladly give their approval, but you always need to respect the wishes of those who prefer not to have their voice or video used on the web. 

Once you have placed your testimonials on the web you'll want to alert your local user group members via your email list, newsletter, or both.  You can also alert other user groups to these testimonials via a blog I've set up at http://usergrouptestimonials.blogspot.com

Send me a link to the testimonials, along with the name of your user group, and I'll add that link as a posted entry on this blog. 

We are most human when we're engaged in acts of helping one another. The user group community needs to seize all opportunities to make itself known to the larger community. In time, computer user groups will take on a larger, more central role in society -- perhaps as adjuncts of public libraries, who share the same knowledge-sharing ethic. While it may seem far off in the distance, there may even be a day when computer user groups receive some sort of government funding.

One way to make that happen is to get real serious about documenting the work your user group is doing -- in video and other multimedia forms – on the web. This work needs to be done by more than a few people in each user group.

Phil Shapiro
The author works as an independent Macintosh consultant and writer in the Washington DC-area. He can be reached at pshapiro@his.com and at http://www.digitaldivide.net/profile/pshapiro
His blog can be found at http://www.digitaldivide.net/blog/pshapiro
Other articles he has written can be found via his Del.icio.us site at http://del.icio.us/pshapiro

There is no restriction against any non-profit group using this article as long as it is kept in context with proper credit given the author.  The Editorial Committee of the Association of Personal Computer User Groups (APCUG), an international organization of which this group is a member, brings this article to you.