It’s getting close to the end of the second semester of school here in North America, so among other things that means award assemblies. Today was the sixth and seventh grade award assembly at Classen SAS in Oklahoma City Public Schools, and I was able to record a short video of my son receiving his certificates. After you record a video on the iPhone, you can view the video by clicking on the Photos gallery. When playing a video, you can drag either end of the “frame viewer” at the top of the screen to change the starting and ending points of the clip.
In the case of today’s video clip, I needed to trim off about ten seconds from the front. After I moved the slider in the frame viewer to the location I wanted, I clicked the TRIM button in the upper right corner and chose to save the video as a NEW CLIP. That way if I accidentally made a mistake and cut off too much, I could still go back to the original clip and edit it again. The originally recorded clip was 34 seconds long, this new clip is just 22 seconds long.
The iPhone doesn’t support full-fledged video editing, but being able to trim clips on the fly is great for situations like this! I uploaded the final video to Flickr with the iPhone app for PixelPipe. Flickr’s video limit is 90 seconds, so short clips like this are ideal to share there. I then posted it to our family learning blog from my laptop.
From one perspective, it may not seem like a big deal to be able to capture and share videos at times like these. Everyday events like this are certainly not as important as birthdays or holiday get-togethers to document. The fact that the iPhone and other tools make it so easy mean this kind of life documentation can be done much more readily. In the “old days” of camcorder video recording, importing and exporting, there is no way I’d have gone to the trouble of sharing just a 20 second video clip like this today. I certainly wouldn’t have been able to do this so rapidly. This is one form of storychasing. I think being able to document and share our lives like this with family and friends is awesome.
This reminds me of a statement I remember hearing from Cory Docorow at least a year ago on TWiT. He said some people say today is “the beginning of history,” because our abilities to document/record and share our lives has taken a quantum leap forward. Documenting events like today’s school awards ceremony may be a case in point.
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