Did a quick tech test of Ustream last night to see if we could use it to stream the carnage of Art Fight. Have to say, I’m fairly impressed with the results. All I had to do was plug in my camera, hit record, and the little web app recorded my impromptu sketching session. This is great for little quicky vids like this. Once you’re finished, you can send your recorded video to YouTube. I don’t know how it deals with videos longer than ten minutes yet. May have to run another test sometime tonight. But if we get permission from the Ottobar and the musicians performing, we could be streaming Art Fight live so you can watch from the comfort of your own home.

I can’t imagine anyone sitting through me drawing or coloring an entire page, but apparently, Ustream is the webcartoonist’s new platform of choice. There are some nice encoding tools once you’ve recorded your show. It records your video as an flv, but you can request to have it dumped out as an mp4, mov, or wmv. You can then download the format of your choice and keep it on your machine to archive your show or upload to wherever. The help docs say you can upload to other sites like blip and such directly from the interface, but it wasn’t working for me last night. YouTube obviously worked like a charm, but the other services were unavailable (either I’m a moron which is more than likely, or this is something they’re trying to fix).

Overall, quite impressed. Very easy to just plug and play. Haven’t gone much further than that. At some point, I’ll want to figure out how to take video of my screen. Perfect solution if you don’t want to mess with editing and don’t care too much about high quality video.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 at 9:05 am and is filed under Art, Events, Vlog, Super Art Fight. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.