An overview of software for multimedia editing, video hosting & podcasting

Target audience: Nonprofits, social change organizations, educators, NGOs, citizen journalists, media makers. This is part of Creating Media, our ongoing series designed to help nonprofits and other organizations learn how to use and make media.

By Kaitlin LaCasse and Laura S. Quinn
Idealware

Want to get started using audio or videos to engage your current supporters and pull in new ones? There are a number of tools that put multimedia within the reach of most nonprofits. In this excerpt from the Idealware Field Guide to Software for Nonprofits: Fundraising, Communications and Outreach, we explore three related multimedia topics. First, we take a look at multimedia editing software, which can help you whip your audio or video files into shape for public distribution. Then we explore how video sharing websites can help you put your video into the world. Finally, we talk about podcasts, a way to let people easily subscribe to audio or video shows.

Multimedia editing

Multimedia editing software gives you the capability to create videos or audio recordings with a level of a polish that used to require a lot of expensive hardware. Good editing takes time and some skill, but a number of low-cost, straightforward packages put the tools within reach of any nonprofit.

With audio packages, you can edit interviews for length, cut “um”s and pauses, and add music or voiceover introductions. Both GarageBand (for the Mac) and Audacity (for the PC or Mac) are free, solid tools that provide all the functionality you’re likely to need. If you’re eligible for the Adobe donation program through TechSoup, you may be able to get professional-grade Adobe Audition for a $35 admin fee.

Video tools let you cut out pieces you don’t want, splice different sections together, and overlay graphics and text onto your piece. You might join an interview with a constituent together with scenes of your program participants, and put a title screen at the beginning — and even upload it to YouTube with a single click.

For Mac users, iMovie (free with the Mac OS X operating system) is a great editing tool for simple movies. The free editing software available for PCs, on the other hand — like Windows Movie Maker and Pinnacle Systems’ VideoSpin — can be difficult to work with, and often imposes insistent front-and-center ads or confusing limitations on supported formats. For PC users, a good alternative is Adobe Premiere Elements (pictured at right, $15 for nonprofits on TechSoup, or the movie editor is about $79 retail), which provides friendly features very similar to iMovie.

[Editors note: There are also a few online video editing options, including Jaycut.com (free), Motionbox.com (free), Moviemasher.com (free & open source) and Kaltura (fee-based and open source, though these solutions have serious limitations.]

If you’ve outgrown the low-cost options, or want to create more robust animations or special effects, Final Cut Express and Final Cut Pro provide logical stepping stones for Mac users, while Adobe Premiere Pro (a $70 admin fee for eligible nonprofits through TechSoup) is a popular option for both Macs and PCs. These products, all under $1,000 retail, provide all the power you’re likely to need. If you need more, consider hiring a professional video editor.

Video sharing websites

Videos can provide a compelling way to tell your story online. While they can be expensive to produce, both in staff time and actual money, video sharing websites let you upload videos to the web for free. Once they’re online, viewers can comment and share them with friends. In general, you maintain ownership of the videos you post, but you grant the site certain rights — before you post a video, read the site’s Policies and Terms carefully.

There are many free video sharing options, including YouTube , Blip.tv, Revver and Vimeo. DoGooderTV is geared specifically at nonprofits. Brightcove lets you show videos and video pages without any logo or branding for Brightcove itself, but starts at $2,000 per month. YouTube offers nonprofit-specific functionality, like the ability to create a branded YouTube channel, link calls to action directly in videos or accept donations directly through the video page.

Want to “go viral”? If enough people share a video, it can spread around the Web exponentially, eventually reaching an enormous audience — this rare, sought-after phenomenon is known as “going viral.” There’s no recipe for creating viral videos, but you can start by making sure it’s relevant and irresistible enough to compel people to share. And then cross your fingers.

Many of these video sharing websites also allow you to post the videos on your own Web page or blog. They provide HTML (the coding language of websites) code for you to copy and paste to embed the video. In most cases, the sites’ logos are displayed on these videos.

Podcasts: Hosting and directories

Podcasts are syndicated audio or video shows that allow people to subscribe. Once that’s done, whenever a new show is available, files are automatically downloaded onto subscribers’ computers. In fact, that’s the main difference between podcasts and other types of audio or video files — podcasts are subscription-based and downloaded via RSS so subscribers don’t have to seek them out.

Nonprofits can use them in a number of ways to create awareness or educate people about their causes. Podcasts can be useful to record and broadcast meetings, conference calls, speeches and more. Keep in mind, though, that creating polished multimedia content is time-consuming. If you have the audio or visual content or the experience to create podcasts, they can provide an interesting way to distribute information, but think carefully about the time involved before committing yourself to creating new multimedia content on a regular basis.

The first step is to record audio or video using a microphone or camera, and edit it using multimedia editing software like GarageBand or Audacity, mentioned above. Once you’ve polished the content and exported it into a standard file format, decide whether to post the podcast on your own site or on a site designed to store and share them, like Hipcast.com, LibSyn, Podbus, Ourmedia or others. These sites range from free to around $5 per month.

Once your podcast is hosted and published, people can subscribe via most RSS readers. You should also submit your podcast to a site like iTunes or Odeo that allows people to easily find it. On these sites, users search for podcasts or enter their Web addresses, and the site downloads the files directly onto their computers, iPods or other portable devices as soon as they are available.

Related

• Comparing Terms of Service at video sites (Socialbrite)

• BlogTalkRadio: Extend the reach of your nonprofit (Socialbrite)

• More in our Making media series

The post A quick guide to multimedia software appeared first on Socialbrite.

For the annual conference of the Online News Association this weekend, I’ve pulled together two new printable handouts: 8 ways to use social media in the newsroom, available at http://bit.ly/social-flyer, and 6 Twitter tools for journalists (PDF — and see the accompanying post). I’m speaking on the aptly named Social Media Mania panel on Saturday.

I think these are two of the nicer handouts I’ve produced, using Apple Pages, part of the iWork suite. These downloadable documents are part of the ongoing series of social media guides and tutorials that Socialbrite has been producing for social change organizations, nonprofits, journalists and anyone interested in effective use of social media.

While the PDFs are spiffy-looking, they’re less than optimal for search engines and for the disabled, so I’ll mirror the handouts here in html.

8 ways to use social media in the newsroom

FriendFeed

1An uber-aggregator of your feeds, FriendFeed is like Twitter but easier to organize. You can post more than 140 characters, organize private or public rooms and get a feed of your friends as an e-mail. But FriendFeed is more than an aggregation tool: It’s a virtual watering hole where you can see what’s on the mind of your friends and colleagues.

Search the real-time Web

2Find out what people are talking about online right now — chances are you can turn a meme into a story. Tools include Twitter Search, Tweetmeme, OneRiot, Scoopler.

Flip out!

3We’re all multimedia journalists now, right? Never let another eye-catching moment or newsworthy subject slip by: A Flip cam ($199 for hi-def version) lets you easily add a visual element to a story. Users are more likely to jump into a conversation around a video on your site than a text-only article. Kodak’s Zi8 is also a good choice.

Skype

4The service, which is free for Skype-to-Skype calls and inexpensive for calls to land and mobile lines, lets you conduct and record interviews with industry leaders in the US or overseas. A nice bonus: You can capture it as a video chat, upload it to YouTube, embed it and invite readers to comment on your site.

Start an instant social network

5That’s what NPR’s Andy Carvin did with the Ning. Dozens of people chipped in valuable info as Hurricane Gustav rumbled toward landfall. You needn’t wait for a disaster: Pop open a free social network on Ning (or a similar site like KickApps) around a topic that may generate community interest.

Become an online radio host

6Sign up with BlogTalkRadio (it’s free) to host live call-in shows about your beat or specialty. Do it weekly to gather a following.

Live blogging

7Live-blogging a newsworthy event has an advantage over live-tweeting: Your coverage can generate comments for months. CoveritLive is the best of the lot; it includes integration with Twitter, Qik for live video and YouTube pre-recorded video.

Upload & embed video

8Lots of large companies have begun creating YouTube channels. And even more have begun embedding high-quality videos, like TED Talks. Nervous? Sites like Magnify.net, Viddler, Kaltura and Brightcove offer paid commercial uploads.

The post 8 ways to use social media in the newsroom appeared first on Socialbrite.

Guest post by Renee Blodgett
CEO, Magic Sauce Media

At this week’s AlwaysOn Stanford Summit, the open source video company Kaltura organized and participated in a SaaS Goes Open Source panel (SaaS as in Software as a Service).

In this video interview, Kaltura CEO Ron Yekutiel says open source is disruptive but on the rise, and it tears down those garden walls, giving corporations better control, flexibility and better integration. SpikeSource, Zimbra, Acquia, Fenwick & West and Alfresco were the other companies joining Ron on the panel.

The post Open source’s growing influence appeared first on Socialbrite.

Socialbrite readers get 15 percent the registration fee (regularly $75 for individuals and nonprofits and $200 for companies). The event will be held June 19-20 at NYU.

“If you want an open structure of media to guarantee that the future of media is not proprietary and locked down, then open is the only way to go,” he said. “If we care about democratized media, where citizens in their living rooms can access programming from more than just three or four media conglomerates, then we should care about open video.”

But David’s warning is not a call to arms against entrenched corporate interests. “Millions of lines of code have been written in the open video world without a lot of success,” he acknowledged.

Rather, it’s a call for reasoned partnerships: public and private, new and old, for-profit and nonprofit. We need to think beyond licenses and consider how to build real businesses that are built on open and democratic principles — and translate that into real economic value. In short, he argues that open video is not just about serving the interests of users. Open video is good for business, too.

Surveying the open media landscape

Davis is one of the few people I’ve heard who can provide context around what has been happening in the open source movement. Some developers, like those working on Ogg Theora, are focusing on open-sourcing the codec through video compression. Others, like the Mozilla Foundation, are targeting the user experience through the Firefox browser. (Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari run on the open source WebKit rendering engine.) Still others, like ccMixter (a community remix site sponsored by Creative Commons) and Jamendo (a music platform and community where you can download and listen to over 15,000 albums legally) are targeting the content licensing layer. And David’s own Kaltura is the first open source video platform for online video management, creation, interaction and collaboration; with more than 25,000 publishers, “it’s the fastest-growing video platform on the Web,” he said. Wikipedia is scheduled to begin using Kaltura’s video platform throughout the online encyclopedia some time this summer. (Another worthy effort is the Participatory Culture Foundation’s Miro software.)

All told, a global community of developers has emerged around the open video movement, he said. “From my perspective, the world is divided into three parts: The technical architecture of an open system. The legal issues around who owns content management rights. And the infrastructure layer: codecs, formats, patents.”

The Open Video Conference is one measure of the movement’s robustness. With zero marketing budget, the organizers quickly heard from 180 different projects and nonprofits that applied to present. Somewhere between 600 and 800 people are expected to attend. From the website: “Open Video is more than just open codecs. It’s the growing movement for transparency, interoperability, and further decentralization in online video.”

David said that over the past year or so, some clarity has come to the open video movement. “One of the things we learned is that we can’t use Flash in the production layer, because under Adobe’s term, we’re free to use it but not free to use and rework in the sense of free software.” Thus, Kaltura is participating in developing an open source alternative.

Open video adherents like David are not against Apple or Adobe, but they do want to create an alternative in the market that uses true open source technology as the basis for a for-profit business. “We’re running a business, not a charity,” David said.

Of the creative ferment in the open source video movement, he said, “I see a tremendous amount of interest in the market for this, connecting people who are working on browsers and codecs and players and bring them all together. There’s something in the air.”

Related

• My video interview with Kaltura CEO and co-founder Ron Yekutiel
• Streamingmedia.com: Shay David essay, “Industry Perspectives: The Promise of Open Source Video”

The post The promise of open source video appeared first on Socialbrite.

I‘ve been following Kaltura for about a year now. It offers a terrific open-source platform, toolset and nearly free video hosting solution for small and large companies and nonprofits. (I think I have that right — it’s hard to explain what they do in a single sentence.)

From the site: “Kaltura’s goal is to bring interactive video to every site and to create the world’s largest distributed video network.”

Here’s a 9-minute video interview with CEO Ron Yekutiel. They’re about to give users the capability to add video and widgets to Wikipedia, and they’re working with MediaWiki.org as well. They also offer an extension that provides WordPress blogs with video abilities.

Watch the video on Vimeo
Watch the video in H.264 (QuickTime) on Ourmedia
Download the original video from Archive.org

The post Kaltura: open source video appeared first on Socialbrite.