As of May 16th I have been employed with the Alumnae Association for over a year and am experiencing my first official Alumnae Reunion weekend. Because I was so new last year I was not required to work the weekends, but I am making up for it this year. I have been commissioned to create the first virtual Global Reunion. It is a program that makes reunion highlights available online to alumnae around the world. Global Reunion’s features include a Message Board, Photo Galleries, Online Videos, Webcam and Guestbook. Images of the events are posted on line later the same day, or leat the following day.
The project is a combination of passive and interactive features that involve a variety of different applications (most of which are open source and/or free software) and technologies. I will be devoting separate articles to some of the programs I have used and the processes of getting a large number of videos and photos online in a short span of time that was not possible just a few years ago.
The reunion itself is interesting. I personaly do not have any close ties with my alma mater, Flagler College in St. Augustine, Florida. I have never attended my own reunions, so it is especially interesting to see the alumnae that are attending their 25th and 50th reunions. The Class of 1956 has a 30 minute historical photo slideshow that was compiled by one of it's members. She had it on DVD to play in the dorms over the weekend. I encoded the video and posted it online. Be sure to check it out, because it contains numerous photos of the campus, students and the community from the 1950's. Many things have changed, but some things are still the same because girls will be girls and Mount Holyoke continues its long held traditions which help keep it anchored in the past as it progresses forward in to the future.
For my techie readers, I used Handbrake, a free open source program to encode and compress the video from the DVD in a usable format for the web, as well, as Apple's video iPod. Using the H.264 codec I was able to squeeze the 30 minute video down to 143 MB. It is 320x240 at 15 frames per second. You can double the size and it still looks great. The soundtrack has some static in it, but not because of the quality of the encoding. Classic vinyl LP's, that were probably from the '50s, were used. I had originally encoded the DVD using a 1.6 Gz G4 Powerbook and it took over 3 hours. But I did not use the H.264 codec or do a double pass and the video was over 250 MB in size. I re-encoded the video on a dual processor 1.8 Gz G5 Power Mac and it was finished in less than 30 minutes resulting in a muuch smaller file.