An enhanced podcast about this lovely High Renaissance Madonna by Raphael.

An enhanced podcast about this beautiful painting at MoMA.

My first enhanced podcast using garage band, and then saved as a quicktime so it can play here, but also as an “M4A” so that in iTunes (hopefully) it will show up as an enhanced podcast (which it won’t, I believe if it is an MP3) … ugh! all these different file types are driving me insane!

I spent most of yesterday afternoon creating an enhanced podcast from one of our existing audiofiles — the one on Cezanne’s Still Life at MoMA. I had been looking at Pachyderm — and trying to create an example learning object to show the folks at the Museum at FIT what’s possible without a big technology budget. I realized that most of the Pachyderm templates allow for small movie files (2-3MB), but all of our screencasts are much larger. So, I thought that if I made an enhanced podcast with Camtasia, using only a few still images, perhaps the file size would be small enough to be plugged into Pachyderm.

So, I set out to make an enhanced podcast — it took a long time. As usual, a lot of time was spent gathering the right images and bringing them into Camtasia. Then I seemed to have problems with matching the still images with where I wanted them to go with the audio. When I would shift over the image, it seemed like other parts of the movie would shift in other places, and so I had to go back several times to fix things. When I first produced it as a quicktime movie, the transitions, which looked so lovely in Camtasia looked bad, and in addition, a couple of times the images changed sizes — when I hadn’t done that. And I think that later when I opened the Camtasia files, the alignment of the audio and visual tracks had shifted again.

Anyway, I got rid of the transitions and re-produced it. It is still too large (13MB) to put into Pachyderm I think, since the instructions there say 3-4 MB because of download time. Still, it might be useful to try it. We’ll see what it looks like on the video ipod…

Here it is.

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