Shouting Stones - seminar for churches
I've been giving myself some short breaks from the serious business of preparing next year's new courses (for the first semester 50% of three new ones) by working on a new short "video" introducing the seminar I offer for churches Shouting Stones: geography and archaeology reveal the Missionary God of the Old Testament. The full thing started life as a weekend camp, was cut down to just a few 50min academic hour sessions, and now I've made part one into a quarter of an hour's video called "Who is God?" (there is also a low bandwidth version).I wonder if I've used too many presentation slides and too few pictures, and also whether I should have adapted the material more as well as compressing or summarising... Do let me know what you think, I'm not really thin skinned! ¶ 5:24 PM
[to Del.icio.us]
(Insert imprecatory psalm about Windows Media codecs here)
Wouldn't play on the Mac (OS X 10.3.9) with Microsoft Media Player 9, nor with Quicktime with Flip4Mac installed, nor with the latest version of VLC.
Got sound (sort of), but lots of complaints about video.
Perhaps a different format would be more "open".
More info on Flip2Mac:
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/player/wmcomponents.mspx
By 
Stephen G, at
December 18, 2006 8:12 PM
I'm with Stephen about the codecs. A superb tool is "Riva FLV Encoder" It will convert almost anything to flash (and almost anything to almost anything) another option would be the open source ffmpeg but you need a fairly high powered linux machine to make that work.
As for the video (which being a windows user I could watch) it is a very good (Web 1.0) presentation. I confess I did drift slightly once or twice. I like to put that kid of thing on while I do other stuff. I suspect that it depends upon your intended market. It would definitely make a good introduction to discussion in a conventional house group.
I have been thinking about how we best re imagine Christian learning in our current (western?) context. I think this kind of thing is a great idea if we could intertwine it with (web 2.0) interactivity.
Thanks for sharing it with is. (also thanks for the pod bible bookmarks, I must talk to you about that some time).
By 
Graham Doel, at
December 19, 2006 1:45 AM
Really liked the video. Anytime we can glorify the name! dt www.davetilma.com
By dt, at
January 14, 2007 2:46 PM
Thanks, Dave!
By Tim, at
January 15, 2007 6:57 AM
Same for me; no video, but some sound. I'd suggest using Flip4Mac: http://www.flip4mac.com/
Studio version. Very inexpensive and guarantees that everyone will be able to view the content. F4M is the most used piece of software on my Mac.
Looking forward to seeing the video.
By Antonio, at
January 24, 2007 5:52 AM
Nice one people, the consensus is none of the multiple formats in the post above works for every Mac user. So I need to buy Flip-4-Mac then the video will play on Macs. Trouble is I'd have to buy a Mac first to run Flipping-4-M. And people say MS uses too many proprietary formats ;-)
By Tim, at
January 24, 2007 9:14 AM
