Even though I’m a big fan of the cloud and cloud applications (I’ve been using Google Drive and Docs for a couple of years now instead of desktop), multimedia has always been a kind of watershed for me demarcating the limits of online applications. Things, are beginning to change, however. Photoshop has been recently made available for chromebooks and there have been many other applications before. What has been missing (not counting professional features not really required in education) is speed and integration.
With some new features in Android Lollipop (screen recording without rooting the device), I have been motivated to give it a try and create a video podcast without any desktop application, just using a smartphone and a chromebook.
The project involved the following steps:
part one: android smartphone
- recording the screen and voice on a smartphone using the (free) scr 5+ Android app
- recording video using the photo app
- uploading the footage from the smartphone to YouTube
part two: chromebook
- starting the YouTube creator to edit
- assembling and trimming the clips
- levelling audio
- using YouTube creative commons music for the jingle
- writing the closed captions in Google Docs
- downloading the captions as a .txt file and uploading to YouTube for automatic caption processing
- saving and publishing the video
All in all the result comes across less professionally than if you use a desktop application. But the workflow definitely beats the desktop if your expectations aren’t too high, plus it would make collaborative projects (e.g. a video of a field trip with footage from many students) much easier to handle.
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