Clint's Tech Integration Resources

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About Me

Howdy - I'm Clint and I am the Technology Integration Specialist for SEDC, Southwest Educational Development Center in the beautiful SW corner of Utah. Welcome to my posterous site.

Any training I do, any resource that I need to share, or anything that I stumble across that is just plain cool I'll share here. Check out the Tags below to quickly get to a topic, or do a Search for what you can remember from a training of mine.

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Ninja-Like Video Skills

Yesterday I was trying to help a teacher who is trying her hardest to effectively use video with her class. She has done a great job all year, but had fallen victim to the morass that is all of the different video codecs out there for video (both online and with different cameras), and all of the Mac Vs. PC video incompatibilities.

She has also learned the hard way that just because a video is 'saved' on her blog does not necessarily mean that she can retrieve that video from the blog to include in a DVD of the class videos from the year.

With a suggestion from a colleague, today I found a way to get that video back out from Blogger that was seemingly locked up in a Flash video container and convert it back to the .mov format that it began life in. Here's what I did:

  1. I headed to this teachers blog page on Blogger.com, and watched the video in Flash format on my computer. 
    1. a. Make sure that you have a file in your 'Downloads' folder called "videoplayback.flv" - this is the Flash container that the video file lives in.
  2. Download and install MPEG Streamclip from Squared 5. It's available in both Mac and PC formats, so it plays nice on both sides.
  3. Download and install the Perian preference pane from Perian.org. It's the "swiss-army knife for QuickTime", and allows playback for a LOT of the video formats that are out there.
  4. Open up MPEG Streamclip, and then open the videoplayback.flv file from your downloads folder, and confirm that you do, indeed, have the video in question, making sure that the entire clip and audio are intact.
  5. In MPEG Streamclip, head to the File menu, and select 'Export to QuickTime..." I stuck with the default settings that came up in the next window, and click "Make Movie". The only thing that I changed was the filename from the existing name to one that made sense for the video.
  6. Sit back, relax, and let the magic happen. Once it's done transcoding, watch the video in it's new format in the QuickTime player, use it in iMovie, or whatever else you want.

Note: Do NOT do this with copyrighted video! This video was created entirely by the teacher I was working with, and had no copyrighted materials in it.

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