My Moxon Beam Video ran on Ham Nation this week. You can see the full episode at Ham Nation #67. My video starts at 14 minutes into the show. But while you’re there, check out the entire episode. I really enjoy watching the show live on Wednesday evenings. The recorded version is usually posted on Thursday or Friday. Great coverage of ham radio topics.
Archive for Video
I had some fun today pulling together a video designed to promote Jamboree on the Air to radio amateurs. It’s right at three minutes and gets a fair bit of information across in that reasonably palatable timeframe. We took the raw video at the National Scouting Museum this past week and then I stitched it all together today.
I didn’t really use a script. Instead, I pulled together a few notes prior to the video shoot and then stumbled my way through a few takes. It came together reasonably well during the editing process, getting all the key points across. I was also able to use quite a few iMovie features to add some pep to the essentially talking head video. By using some music at the beginning and end, some deft transitions, along with a fair number of titles and photos, I feel that it should serve it’s purpose well. I don’t expect it to go viral, but it will get the message out to a few people.
Here’s the video. Click on the link to see the HD version. Let me know what you think.
Jamboree on the Air from K2BSA on Vimeo.
I was pleased to see my K5ND Station Tour video play on Ham Nation in June. This time I’ve created a video on my 15 meter, two-element, Moxon beam. The Moxon has been a popular posting on my blog and it is one area of the station that I built myself from plans published in the May 2003 issue of QST Magazine. Written by KG4JJH with additional detailed drawings, the beam has worked flawlessly since the first time I put it up. It also helped me breakthrough in working Europe and Asia in contests using QRP power levels.
For this video, I added a CAD U1 USB microphone to record the voiceover. I found this to be a marked improvement over using the internal iMac microphone. For editing I again used iMovie. With this video I used all still images and the Ken Burns effect to provide some motion. My current video camera is not HD and I felt that the video in the Station Tour looked pretty rough compared to the still images. This microphone will really come in handy when I record some more podcasts. BTW, I’ve found a couple of P.G. Wodehouse short stories that will work perfectly for my next podcast. Stand by.
I’ve posted the video on a page on this site titled Moxon Beam. Check it out.
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve sure enjoyed watching Ham Nation the past several weeks. It is light and breezy, and oh so informal. Yet, it is very informative and really captures the fun and adventure of amateur radio. The effort required to do a weekly live hour-long television show is not small by any means. Yet they manage to provide a full and engaging show week after week.
Although, perhaps they’ve reached a nadir — they showed my station Video Tour this week. You can see the full episode at Ham Nation. It’s episode number 53, The Night Before Field Day. Check it out and watch my video as well.
I’ve been watching Ham Nation with Bob Heil, K9EID, for the last several weeks — since I met Bob during the ICOM and Boy Scouts of America’s sponsorship announcement at this year’s Dayton Hamvention. A couple of weeks ago, Bob issued a challenge to provide the show with video tours of our ham shacks. That rang a bell — I can do that!
I’ve done a few videos for my church, but those had been mostly photos with a music sound track. I had also edited several video testimonials. All those went on a DVD for the church with a few posted online. This time I got to focus on the my amateur radio passion and on my ham shack. I also thought it might prove of interest to my blog followers, as the Ham Shack page on my website is the most popular page after the home page.
I gave some thought to just what I’d put on the video. My first thought was to focus initially on what I feel is the most important part of the station — the antennas. I thought quite a bit about what I’d say about each antenna, perhaps even covering the plans I have for improvement. Likewise for the ham shack itself. In the end, I instead focused on a short overview of the entire station, beginning with the antennas. The final video came out to 72 seconds. You can see it here — Ham Shack Video Tour.
The video clips were captured using a simple Kodak snapshot camera, as witnessed by the low resolution video scenes. I also used a number of still images, also captured with the same camera but at a much better resolution. For editing, I used Apple’s iMovie and one of their themes for the cover page, transitions, and credit page. I used Apple’s GarageBand to generate the CW opening (K5ND) and closing (73). I then provided the voiceover directly into the built-in microphone on my Apple iMac. There does seem to be a theme here, Apple. I use Macs at work in publishing and communication. Plus, my wife and daughter also use Apple laptops and iPhones. We haven’t yet erected a shrine to Steve Jobs, but we are considering it…
I then uploaded the video to YouTube and finally learned how to embed the video on my webpage. When I’d done this earlier with the home page video for the K2BSA website, I just couldn’t figure out how to embed the file. This time I found that the standard YouTube embed code is HTML5. Which doesn’t work on my WordPress websites. For K2BSA I ended up using Vimeo, whose instructions fit my requirements. This time I found the old HTML embed instructions and was able to make it work. However, I prefer the Vimeo presentation on my site. So that’s the one I went with for the final version of the webpage.
Another fun project in My Adventures in Ham Radio!