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Video Toolkit Tools for Ethnographers to enhance communication of project findings and methods

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The Problem For many reasons, we seldom have enough time to fully design our final output at the end of a project. How can we do better? How can we help our clients see the same information in new ways? How can we make a summary book or presentation come alive for other audiences?

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Helpful Tools With several simple, affordable tools some of which are free, you can create compelling presentations and videos to better communicate with your team, your client and your client’s stakeholders. These tools can be used on their own or in combinations to create entire videos or video clips that can be embedded into presentations like PowerPoint and Keynote. They can also enhance movies done in iMovie or other video editing programs.

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Screen Capture One of the most versatile tools is a still and video screen-capture program. Screenography can be used to capture video of screen actions from user testing to capturing an animation on a website or from video. The program saves the movie in numerous formats. These video clips can be used simply in a presentation or can be combined and used in a larger movie.

$40.00 USD

www.verticalmoon.com

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Web Movie Capture This simple and free tool is a Firefox add-on plugin. This tool is perfect for grabbing a clip from YouTube of other .FLV based video hosting services. It is very useful for capturing historic videos or right-free movie clips to enhance the context of a presentation or short movie. It is helpful to capture videos or TV commercials that a user may have referenced in an interview.

Free

www.downloadhelper.net

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Movie Editing QuickTime is both a file format and a video player, but the PRO version is a simple editing tool that will allow you to cut and trim videos. It is highly useful and fast to edit user interviews using this tool when you need several clips and quotes from field research. Once you convert your video to QuickTime, you can easily select the section to save. These clips can go into presentations, a tool like Animoto or a full movie tool like iMovie.

$30.00 USD

www.apple.com

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Video Converter A great multi-tasking tool is a video converter. There are a variety of video formats that do not always work well with each other or different editing programs. Also, different cameras may use different formats and that can be another hurdle in editing. iSkySoft is a handy tool that allows to batch convert many files types. This is a key tool in your video toolkit.

$35.00 USD

www.iskysoft.com

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Presentation"Software The presentation tool itself is part of the toolkit. If you have a Mac, Keynote is a great tool for adding animations and movement to numbers and graphics. Keynote also easily embeds video clips for playback inside your presentation - as opposed to switching. If you use PowerPoint, iSkySoft can convert videos to formats that run better on PCs and inside PowerPoint.

$80.00 USD

www.apple.com

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Apple Keynote"Templates If you can use Apple’s Keynote program, templates from this website are incredibly useful for adding great design with minimal effort. The templates can be set for HD screens or laptops, or even for iPhone environments. These screens are using the KeynotePro template called SONOMA. There are also templates for Apple Pages, a document program. This can make creating final printed reports much faster and easier.

$25.00 to $35.00 USD per template

www.keynotepro.com

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Slideshow"Program There are many simple online slideshow programs but Animoto may be the best. The PRO version gives you access to a large library of free rights-ready music which can be highly useful for client presentations. The program is allows some control but for the most part you simply upload photos of slides (PPT or Keynote) arrange the order, choose music and press start. The Pro version can also create HD video files as well as files that can be used to create a DVD. Or they will mail you a DVD of your movie.

$250.00 USD per year

www.amimoto.com

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Photo"Motion Capture In video, it is called the “Ken Burns Effect” where a camera moves over a photograph to make it more alive and impactful. This tool is designed to make slideshows from many photos. But the real power is when you take one photo and add a path over the picture and create a movie. Thus, you can pan and zoom over a chart, a graph, a photo, a screenshot of a webpage, etc. The program saves that as a movie that you can use in PPT, Keynote or in a full video.

$50.00 USD

www.lqgraphics.com

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Timeline This web-based tool does only one this but it does it really well. It creates a 3D timeline using dates you enter, descriptions of the activities and an image or graphic. It is great for presentations in that it shows the relationship in time of key activities. For example, it can visually demonstrate the time needed for recruiting participants! It also can save files in very high resolution HD format.

$65.00 USD

www.beedocs.com

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Photo Tool This photo tool interface is more fun than useful but it can be used to show the sheer number of photos taken by field researchers for a project. It makes a 3D gallery of photos that can be captured as a movie using Screenography and then saved a movie for presentations or a larger movie. Also works on YouTube and Flickr. It is another free plugin for Firefox and Safari.

Free

www.cooliris.com

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Worldle/Tag-Cloud This very simple tool is good for visualizing word patterns. You can take user quotes and use this website to create a WORDLE (which is kind of like a tag-cloud). The website gives you control over font and color and layout for maximum effect or simplicity. Using Screenography, you can capture the Wordle. building as a movie file and use in presentations.

Free

www.wordle.net

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Timeline

Create movies of personas, add clips to

Animoto

Personas

Upload JPEGS of presentation to Animoto -

arrange order, add music

Movie

Use Keynote to create slides for a slide show in Animoto - save

as JPEGS

Presentation

Use 3D Timeline to give an overview of

the project

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Convert

Arrange slides, music, clips begin the

render process - edit as

neccessary

Publish

Capture right-free video clip from YouTube

of client context

History

Create short videos of key

Wordles - upload to animoto

Wordle

Convert user interview clips to QuickTime, choose a few short clips, upload to Animoto

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Video Outcome You can see the video and various video clips and other examples on Vimeo.com

http://vimeo.com/robertnmurray