Emily Chang – Designer

It’s the weekend and I’m going through my digital archives and files again. I know, it’s an obsession. While I definitely output a lot to the web and the social sites I use, there’s always an exponentially increasing amount of digital data that I’m collecting on my computer and storage devices. The more I collect on my hard drives, the less fluid I’m feeling. So, I plan to start a process I’ve done before – transferring everything I create or collect from my many hard drives to my site, including notes, designs, references, observations, art, writing, photographs, videos and screenshots… a living archive of personal ephemera.

First off is this small collection of videos shot on my low-res Nikon Coolpix 7900 digital camera at various points. I’ll keep adding to it as an ongoing video diary. I’ve had ideas and plans to do other types of videos with my recently purchased JVC Everio HD camera. I’m still pondering over specific ideas and looking for a chunk of free time but I thought it would be self-motivating if I added a section for videos. If you’d like to get video updates, just subscribe to my main blog RSS feed.

To create web videos, I’m converting my source .mov files to .flv using ffmpegX, a Mac OS X program that runs 20 powerful Unix open-source video and audio processing tools. It’s super fast and easy to use. To display the FLV videos with the flash controller, I’m using Jeroen Wijering’s FLV media player which acts as a single-install and single-file player “skin” for all your videos. The FLV media player is licensed under Creative Commons so you can use it for free and upload it to your own server. I highly recommend both tools for hosting and displaying your own FLV videos.

In the spirit of the social web, I might still upload these to a service like viddler, vimeo, blip.tv. Or not. These days I’m feeling that sometimes there are some digital files you want to keep close to home – like these, captured for personal memories.

Tags: digitallife, emilychang, evideo, flv, opensource, projects, video
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