I needed to...

• Get the digital video camera to tape the game

• Find someone to tape the game

• Learn some nuances of Adobe Premier 4.0

• Watch the entire game in a small window writing down the times of good clips
  • The resolution was lowered on the monitor so that the viewing window would be larger, but as a result, it was difficult to determine certain players or player's numbers.

• Comment on these clips so they could be later identified
  • Comments were limited to a few words, a player's name, etc.

• Find the exact time stamp to start and end each clip

• Record some clips from the camera

• Edit the beginning and end due to lack of precise recording from the camera, namely when you start and end recording, it's manual and therefore difficult to start exactly at the time stamp.

• Compress the videos using Cinepak
  • Lower resolution by a factor of four
  • 10 frames a second, 11 kHz 8 bit mono sound, quality of compression lowered to medium

• FTP videos to evat locker, then link them

• Enhance page visually with background, colors, graphics
  • Get permission from MIT field hockey webmaster to use some graphics and a background

• Watched the videos again and wrote commentary for each clip, first describing the action, then naming the players. The action described including the players is in a different color.

Problems

• I had wanted to put a whole game on the web, but I have found that to be virtually impossible with the resources available to me, keeping in mind download time for people without fast connections to the internet.

• It was frustrating as I learned that the window with the video was going to be much smaller than I had envisioned. Again, with download time and file size, having a large window was not an option.

• I had trouble with the digital video itself, in that when I tried to save a video clip to the hard drive, the video that I ended up with had dropped frames. This caused the clip to have some jumps during the video, and caused skipping.

• The above problem came up again when I tried to finish one clip and compress it. There was one point in the clip where the video jumped back a few frames, so that had to be edited out of the middle of the video.

• I would have rather used a game tape from a game played on the turf because it is more indicative of the team's ability and the way field hockey is supposed to be played. Internationally, turf is the standard. Unfortunately, the only game I was able to have taped was an away game on grass.

Future

• To continue with this project, I will attempt to get previous game tapes and have them digitized. Then I can have more games and different players to present to families at home and prospective freshmen to show a better overview of the skill level of the team and what the program is really like.

• I still would like to get gifs or jpegs of the starting frame of each video and make that the link to the video, while still keeping text links for text browsers.

Questions

• Would it be possible for me to make some animated gifs for some of these clips?
• Would that work, and would that be an alternate way for people with much slower connections to see what's going on better and faster?
• Could these be larger and longer without taking up tons of space?

I got feedback from my dad about the page and its effectiveness (sp?).

Kristie Tate
December 8, 1997
6A26 Seminar
Updated 12/9/97