Committee Update August 9th, 2006

Jesse and I have worked around a few trouble spots. One was no way to import music, the .wav files would keep showing up as empty files. The same thing happened with MP3 files, it has to be the setup. We finally attained volume with a narrator option for the video.

We were working on retaping for Jesse. We had a couple of tries to get the schedules setup and back up plans if anything went wrong. If we could not video Jesse, we would keep the old tape and I would narrate the section for Jesse. We scrambled to locate a microphone and the microphone did not work, we utilized the camera microphone. Towards the end of editing it is a bit of a bear, if you move one item everything else moves also and you spend time then setting everything back in place. This seemed to repeatedly happen everytime I went to open the project to edit. It stopped occuring when every space just about on the volume portion was filled. Since we had introductions of an outside shot along with the major cross streets for each interview there were a few spaces, with four interviews there were a few spaces. Once those spaces were filled it appeared pretty stable.

Our next hurdle was getting the completed video onto a transportable media. Jesse had worked on combining the information with an html shell and the video was to be dropped in the shell.
There were burn CD capabilities on the machine in use, but each time a cd was burnt it would be compressed and not ledgible by the media player. So it would look like the video was there and it was there but it would not open. It would play on the actual machine we used for the editing, but that is not good when it is to be included in a toolkit or on a machine elsewhere. We were back to testing files on two machines. The CD would need to be RW so that Jesse could transfer the toolkit back. With WMM, for some reason although files existed on the CD's some were not readable or indicated empty and now even though the machine has burn capabilities Windows Movie Maker (WMM) would not save a file to a CD. I finally decided with Gina Blankenship (CTEP- Intermedia Arts) to use a flash drive as a tranportable media.

Finally, video finished audio, subtitling, titles, credits, editing, sound....and it was combined with the html shell. Tomorrow is the additional CD cut or burn day. The committee has been fun but going across town in two different cities repeatedly was not exciting.

There is a lot to video editing and alot to html is what Jesse and I both learned. As I explained my problems with the video editing, Jesse was explaining it is the same with the html. If you move one item at times several things with the global would impact the product somewhere else.


Both Jesse and I are relieved with the completion of the toolkit. Jesse will be leaving the state for a new job position and the project wrap up allows us both to wrap up our other work by the end of the month. The biggest thing now for ourselves is the remainder of the CD burn and the handoff. We should complete the project by the end of this week and we are scheduling to give the Accessibility and Usability Committee Toolkit 2006 to those participants who believe their site will benefit along with others for next Friday.