Martin Luther King, Jr. – I Have A Dream
John F. Kennedy – Inaugural Address
Malcolm X - THe Ballot or The Bullet
Martin Luther King, Jr. – I’ve Been To The Mountaintop
Barack Obama-A More Perfect Union
Now that you've bought all your components, it's time for the moment of truth: You're ready to actually put together the machine. Assembling your computer can seem daunting, but it's actually pretty easy. Here's what you need to do.
Step One: Mount Your Motherboard
To start, open up your case's box, take out the case, and open it up. Usually this involves unscrewing a few thumb screws on the back of your case and sliding the side panels off. Take a good look around your case and get acquainted; note where the hard drive bays are, where your CD drive will go, whether the power supply mounts on the top or the bottom, and so on. There should also be a bag of screws inside your case; grab that now and set it aside because we'll need it in a few minutes.
Open up your motherboard box and take out the I/O shield, which is the metal plate that protects the ports on the back of your motherboard. You should see a rectangular space in the back of your case where this should go. Snap it into place. This takes quite a bit of force, so make sure all four sides are snapped in securely.
Next, pull out your motherboard and line up the ports on the back with the I/O shield. You should see that the holes on your motherboard line up with screw holes on the bottom of your case. There are probably more holes on your case than there are on your motherboard, so note which ones these are, and grab your motherboard standoffs from your bag of screws (they have a male screw end on one side, and a female screw hole on the other side). Screw the standoffs into those holes, and set your motherboard on top of them. Screw your motherboard screws into the standoffs so the motherboard is snugly mounted.
Note: Many of you have mentioned that you prefer to install the processor, cooler, RAM, and power supply before mounting the motherboard in the case. I've never done this myself, but in some cases, this may be simpler and save you some digging around in your case. I recommend using your motherboard box as a small "bench" for plugging these parts in if you're going to do it separately.
Step Two: Install Your Processor
Open up your processor's box and gently take it out. Your processor is one of the more fragile parts of the build, so this is one step in which you'll want to be careful. Find the coner of your processor that has a gold arrow on it, then look at your motherboard's processor socket for a similar arrowed corner. Line these two arrows up; this is the direction your processor will go into the socket.
Lift up the lever on the processor socket and put your processor in (Intel motherboards might also have a cover you have to lift up first). Pull the lever down to lock it into place. Again, do this gently—it shouldn't require any feats of strength on your part, so if it isn't falling into place easily, something's wrong. Take it out and try re-setting it, make sure your two arrows are lined up, and of course, double check that your motherboard and processor are of the same socket type.
Once your processor's in, grab the cooler that came with your processor (remember, if you got an OEM processor you have to buy a cooler separately). It should already have some silver thermal paste on the bottom. If not, you'll need to pick some up from the computer store and put a very thin line on your processor—I usually use about the size of a grain of rice or two, that's all.
Set your cooler on top of your processor. If you have an Intel cooler, you'll need to press down on the four pins until the click, and then twisting the top of the peg so they lock into place. You can find more info on this in your processor's manual (it takes a few tries, trust me). AMD coolers, like the one in the above video, are much easier—just hook the two latches on the sides onto the motherboard's square pegs, and pull the lever down to lock it into place.
Step Three: Install Your RAM
Installing RAM is very simple. Find the RAM sockets on your motherboard, and pull the two clips on the side down. Line up the notch in your RAM stick with the notch in the socket, and press the RAM down into place. This might take a bit of pressure, so don't worry about being overly gentle. The clips should snap back into place when the RAM is fully in the socket.
Step Four: Install Your PCI Cards
For your video card (or any other PCI expansion card), find the topmost slot that fits your card and match that up with its plate on the back of the case. Remove that plate and slide the PCI card's bracket in its place. The card should then be sitting on top of the socket, and all you need to do is press down to lock it into place. Screw the bracket onto the case, and you're good to go.
Note that if you need to remove it for any reason, there may be a small lever on the back of the socket you need to press before you pull it out.
Step Five: Install Your Hard Drive
Every case is a little bit different in how they install hard drives. Generally, there are two methods: on some cases, you have to pull out a hard drive tray, put the drive in, screw it in securely, and then slide the tray back in. Other motherboards just require you to slide the bare drive into the bay and then screw it in snug after the fact. Check your case's manual for more detailed instructions on this particular step.
If you're using multiple hard drives and a big case, it's usually a good idea to leave some open space between them—that is, putting them in the first and third bays instead of first and second. This allows for more airflow between them and will help keep them running cool.
Step Six: Install Your Optical Drive
The optical drive should be pretty self-explanatory. Just pull out the plastic cover on one of your 5.25" drive bays and slide in your optical drive. Screw it into place if necessary.
Step Seven: Mount Your Power Supply
Once everything else is in, it's time to install your power supply and plug everything in. (Note that if your case came with a power supply, you can skip this step, as it'll already be installed). It should be pretty obvious where your power supply goes, as there will be a big rectangular hole on the back of your case. Some power supplys mount on the top, while some sit on the bottom of the case. Generally, they mount with the fan facing away from the edge of the case, unless that case has enough space in between the power supply mount and the end of the case to allow for airflow.
Once you set it into place, you should see the holes on the back of the case line up with the screw holes in the power supply. Screw it into place and you're all set.
Step Eight: Plug Everything In
This can be the most tedious and difficult part of the process, depending on your case and power supply. Separate the cords coming out of your power supply and plug them in individually. These are the ones you should have:
A 24-pin Motherboard Cable: This is the biggest cable on the power supply, which gives the motherboard the electricity it needs to run. It has the very long plug with, you guessed it, 24 little pins in it. Most cases should have a 20-pin with a 4-pin on the same cable, so you can just put them together and plug them into the big 24-pin socket on your motherboard. It should lock into place, and might take a bit of strength to get it in all the way. Push it in until you hear the click and you can't pull it out with just a slight tug.
A 4-pin Motherboard Cable: You should also have a separate 4-pin cable coming out of your power supply, and a small 4-pin socket somewhere else on the motherboard. This plugs in the same was as the 24-pin cable—just push down until it locks into place.
6-pin PCI Cables: If you have a rather powerful graphics card, you might have to plug it into your power supply. This requires the 6-pin "PCI" cable coming from your power supply, which should look similar to the 24-pin and 4-pin cables. Plug it into the end of your video card. Note that not all video cards require these cables, so if it doesn't have a socket, you can leave it be.
SATA Power and Data Cables: Your hard drives and optical drive plug in via SATA, which contains two cables. One is the skinny black plug coming out of your power supply, which gives power to those drives. The other is a small red cable that should have come with your motherboard; this is the SATA cable that actually transfers data between your hard drive and everything else.
Plug the power cable into the long pin on your hard drive, and plug the data cable into the short pin. The sockets are L-shaped, so they'll only go in one way. After plugging both cables into the drive, be sure to plug the other end of the data cable into your motherboard, in the sockets labeled SATA. Repeat this entire process with your optical drive.
Molex Power Cables: Your Molex cables power other miscellaneous things in your build, like the case fans. Take the plugs connected to your case fans and plug the male side into the female molex cable on your power supply. This takes a bit of force to get in, and even more force to get out (seriously, these are my least favorite cables of all time).
Note that some fans, like the one on your CPU, might have a smaller connector that actually plugs into your motherboard instead of the power supply instead of via Molex. The small headers will be labled CPU_FAN or SYS_FAN. This not only gives power to your fans, but also lets you control their speed with certain programs.
Front Panel Audio, USB, and FireWire Connectors: Most cases have a few ports on the front, which can include but are not limited to USB, FireWire, headphone, and microphone jacks. You should see some small cables coming out of the front of your case labeled things like USB, HD AUDIO, and 1394 (which is FireWire). Plug these into their corresponding 8-pin headers on the motherboard—usually labeled USB, AUD, and 1394, or something of the sort.
Power Switch and LED Connectors: Lastly, you should have a few small cables labeled POWER SW, RESET SW, HDD LED, and so on. These connect the switches and LEDs on the front of your case to the motherboard, so you can actually turn your computer on. They all consist of only one or two pins, and all plug in on an 8-pin header somewhere on the motherboard. This varies from build to build, so you'll have to check your motherboard's manual to see how they all plug in. Your motherboard may also have a small speaker that plugs into an 8-pin connector, which you'll find in your motherboard box and will be listed in your motherboard's manual.
A Note on Cable Management
As you're doing all this, you want to be wary of where you're putting these cables. Generally, you want to keep them as out of the way as possible. The more they're tangled up in the middle of your case, the more they're going to block airflow from your fans, causing your computer to run hotter, louder, and possibly even overheat. Your case may have come with some zip ties to help you wrap them up and get them out of the way. Some cases even come with built-in cable management features, like clips or holes through which you route these cables to keep them out of the way.
Cable management is a beast unto its own, and it differs from case to case, so it's just something you'll have to fiddle with. I could do an entire night school on cable management, but I won't. If you have a particularly complicated build where a few simple zip ties won't suffice, I recommend checking out NCIX Tech Tip's cable management guide, which will take you through some more advanced cable management techniques.
Turning It On
When you're done, plug in the power cable in the back, flip the power switch on, and press the power button on the front of your case. If all goes well, your computer should turn on and, if you plug a monitor into your video card (or motherboard, if you don't have a video card), you should see what's called the POST screen. From there, you can head into your BIOS setup by pressing a key on your keyboard (usually DEL).
At this point, it's probably time to start cleaning up. I usually don't throw anything away but the actual garbage. I keep all the screws, brackets, and miscellaneous pieces I didn't use in the motherboard's box, and that becomes my "build box". That way, in future builds, or if I upgrade that build, I always have extras of everything on hand just in case. It's come in handy on more than one occasion, so I can't recommend this enough if you have any pieces left over.
Common Troubleshooting
If your computer didn't turn on, don't panic. First, recheck everything inside. Is your processor seated correctly? If your RAM all the way in its socket? Are your cables plugged into the right sockets? (this is a big one). Run through the entire process again to make sure you did everything correctly.
If your system turns on but makes a beeping noise instead of going through the POST screen, then you have an error. If you can find your motherboard's BIOS manufacturer (either by watching the POST screen or by searching online), you can diagnose these error codes to find out what's wrong with your system using these pages:
Also remember that Google is an extremely useful tool. If you're having issues but can't figure out what's wrong, try searching the net or posting on a computer building forum like /r/buildapc. If nothing seems to help, you might have a faulty piece of hardware, like your power supply or motherboard, and you should go about exchanging it for something that works. I wouldn't jump to this conclusion too quickly, though—dig around in your case and do some research to make sure you didn't just plug something in incorrectly.
Once you've got a working computer, congratulations! You're in the home stretch, now—all you need to do is install an operating system. We'll come back to that tomorrow, but in the meantime, bask in the gloriousness of your accomplishment—it took a lot of work to get here, and you should feel good about yourself.
Actor Doug Hutchison, 51, has married 16-year-old Courtney Alexis Stodden, an aspiring country singer. That's right, the Green Mile, X-Filesand Lost actor has married a young, beautiful blonde who is 35 years younger than he is. As they say, only in Hollywood.
"We're aware that our vast age difference is extremely controversial," the couple admits. "But we're very much in love and want to get the message out there that true love can be ageless." In their wedding photo, the 50-something actor can be seen clutching his teen bride, who is wearing a sexy strapless white wedding gown. Hutchison's most high-profile role was as bad boy prison guard Percy Wetmore in The Green Mile starring Tom Hanks. On Lost, he played Horace Goodspeed, and on The X-Files, he played Eugene Tooms. He's also appeared in Con Air, Batman & Robin and I Am Sam, as well as 24,CSI: Miami and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit. The new bride is a beauty pageant star and aspiring country singer. At 12, she became a model, and at 15, she competed in the Miss Washington USA pageant. The couple was married in Las Vegas on May 20, where state law requires a parent must give consent for a minor to obtain a marriage license.
Watch Video at Youtube Here.
Free Online Video Editing Tools work within your browser to cut and edit videos without having too much knowledge of video editing. They are really very easy to learn and simple to use.
The main advantage of online video editing tools are they don’t require any plugins or download to use them. Some of these services would allow you to download your finished edited video while some of them allow you to share your finished video in various social sites.
Being an online video editing service it can almost do any complex editing software do like scene transitions, loops, audio overlays, splices and with simple drag and drop actions.
by: MG Siegler
Earlier today, AOL’s Head of AIM Products Jason Shellen sent an email to the entire company urging people not to share its contents with people outside of the company. Even though we’re a part of AOL, we didn’t get that email. Well, that is until someone was kind enough to leak it to us. Hey, we are not outside of the company so that’s fair right? And since we didn’t technically get the email, I have no problem sharing it.
Anyway.
AOL is on the verge of launching a “shiny new video chat product dubbed ‘AV’”. And it actually looks pretty good. It’s video chat, but super-simple. You don’t need an account to use it. You don’t need anything (besides, sadly, Flash installed on your computer). You hit the homepage, start a chat, get a link, and send that to friends. Up to four people can chat at once.
I’ve been playing around with it for a bit. It is super simple and well done. Aside from video chatting, you can text chat and it overlays on your stream in a nice way. You can also make your stream wider and freeze it.
Still in beta for now, Shellen notes that it “represents a lot of hard work by the AIM team over the last few months.” He also says that it’s the first of “several” new AIM launches coming soon. All will be web-focused.
The video chat play is a smart one. This is a space that is heating up really quickly. Apple has FaceTime across their devices, Chatroulette is supposedly making a comeback, Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker are back at work on Supyo (yes, Mike is an investor), and even Skype is back in the news about possible partnerships with Facebook or Google for their technology.
Speaking of Google, we’ve been hearing for months that they’re working on something similar to AV. And I suspect we’ll be hearing more about that shortly.
The point of Shellen’s email today was to share AV internally with AOLers to test it out. But we’re gonna do him one better. We’re going to share the link here so all of you can help test it out! Here she is!
AOL is hosting a product summit at their west coast HQ in Palo Alto next week. I’m sure we’ll be hearing more about AV there. For now, enjoy.
Below, Shellen’s email to the troops. Reached for comment, Shellen refused to and seemed annoyed. Hey, it was either us publishing this or Business Insider, right? We’re brothers!
People of AOL,
AIM is proud to present you with a super secret internal launch (shhh!) of our shiny new video chat product dubbed “AV”. Still in beta, AV is a major step forward that represents a lot of hard work by the AIM team over the last few months.
AV is incredibly easy to use: Visit the home page, start a chat, get a link to send out, and you and up to three other people are video chatting in no time. There’s no account or login required, so there’s very little barrier to entry. Plus… it’s FUN!
As you may know, this is the first of several substantial new AIM launches and the first to represent our shift in focus to better web software. While you might have been one of our early testers of the entire new AIM effort, this is just the video portion and we’ll be in touch soon as the rest rolls out.
What I’m asking of you is to:
1. Use the product by checking out the link below, only with fellow Aol team members.
2. Give us feedback and bug reports through the “Feedback” link in the product.
3. DO NOT SHARE THIS WITH ANYONE OUTSIDE AOL!
4. Sorry, my “caps lock” key got stuck on during number 3. But seriously, don’t do it.Enjoy: http://aim.com/av
Sincerely,
JASON SHELLEN
Head of AIM Products
P: XXX.XXX.XXXX AIM: XXXXXXXX
Palo Alto | NYC | DullesPS: To the ACG team for whom this email will seem oddly familiar, thank you for your help in providing feedback on our alpha version over the past few weeks. Please give us another spin now that we’ve worked out the kinks and keep giving us feedback so we can continue to improve.
CNN -- "I don't have any regrets," Larry Flynt tells CNN's Piers Morgan. "And I do feel that I've done a great deal to expand the parameters of free speech."
The "Hustler" magazine publisher, free speech advocate, and the man whom Morgan called "America's king of porn" will be a guest on Wednesday's "Piers Morgan Tonight."
Flynt's new book, "One Nation Under Sex: How the Private Lives of Presidents, First Ladies, and Their Lovers Changed the Course of American History," presents an in-depth study of the sex lives of U.S. presidents.
Flynt told Morgan that he reached out to Columbia University history professor David Eisenbach when he decided to write the book partly because "nobody would want to read a history book written by a pornographer." Flynt and Eisenbach's research uncovered facts about presidents that they themselves unearthed.
For example, the youngest-ever first lady was 19. After Grover Cleveland's wife died during the campaign, he married his young nanny.
"What does that mean, culturally speaking," asked Flynt. "Today we would not accept an 18 or 19-year-old girl as first lady."
When Morgan asked who the most sexually promiscuous president was, Flynt said it was a toss-up between Warren G. Harding and John F. Kennedy.
Morgan also asked if a rumor that Kennedy would have been disgraced in a year or so -- had he not been assassinated -- were true, Flynt said it was "probably true."
In the book, Flynt refers to Bill Clinton as "the loveable rogue" because even though he lied, Clinton "always wore it on his sleeve. He didn't hide it like many of the conservative Republicans do. So the nation was able to forgive him."
Sex scandals have been prevalent since the founding fathers established the United States Constitution. Flynt pointed out that Thomas Jefferson fathered children with one of his slaves, and first lady Dolly Madison "almost single handedly turned the White House into a brothel."
Flynt also stated that "most people are under the impression that if somebody is promiscuous that they can't be a good president. There's nothing more ridiculous than that."
When Morgan asked whether "most of the greatest American presidents would have been unfaithful," Flynt replied "yes," to which Morgan observed "there seems to be a link between naughty boys and good presidents."
Flynt was nearly assassinated in 1978 when he was shot outside a courthouse. No one was ever charged in the shooting, but Flynt maintains the sniper was a white man upset about an interracial photo shoot published in "Hustler." Flynt remains partially paralyzed and uses a wheelchair.
Flynt told Morgan that he doesn't look back at that day and that when people ask him what being in a wheelchair is like, he tells them he "wouldn't have even thought about it" had they not mentioned it.
Morgan also asked Flynt why the issue of freedom of speech means so much to him.
"Freedom of speech is not freedom for the fellow you love," answered Flynt. "It's freedom for the fellow you hate the most. And a democracy can't exist without free speech and the right to assemble. And that's what Americans tend to forget. And they're born into a culture where they take all of their freedoms for granted."
"When I first started out," continued Flynt, "I used to buy into a former Supreme Court justice's argument that you can't scream fire in a crowded theater. Well, I think you can."
Morgan asked Flynt what his preferred news headline would be following his death, "Larry Flynt, pornographer," "Larry Flynt, free speech campaigner," or "Larry Speech, lifelong controversialist."
Flynt told Morgan he wanted something "much bigger than that. I always felt Moses freed the Jews, Lincoln freed the slaves, and I wanted to free all the neurotics. And I realized in the process that I've helped millions of people get through puberty. I think that's a great accomplishment."
Source: YouTube
YouTube is best known for its viral videos of babies and cats. But there are thousands of decidedly less cute videos racking up the views. How-to videos are extremely popular and some of the creators are actually making serious money.
Want to know how to crochet a flower or solve a Rubik's Cube? How about a guide for making a paper airplane? There's even a video with detailed instructions on how to use clip-in hair extensions.
Sara White, a first grade teacher in Charleston, W.Va., is the woman behind a series of popular videos about hair extensions. White says she posted her first video about hair extensions because she couldn't find a good instructional video on YouTube. When the clicks started adding up, she started adding new videos.
She eventually joined YouTube's partner program, where the site shares ad revenue with people who post videos regularly.
Source: YouTube
"I thought, 'Well, I won't make that much money from it,'" White says. "You know, I thought I'll make a couple dollars a month. But I was like, 'Wow, this is really cool.' I don't have to get a second job now."
Making Over $100,000
This is a common experience among YouTube's 15,000 or so partners.
"A lot of YouTubers describe themselves as accidental entrepreneurs," says Annie Baxter, a YouTube spokesperson.
YouTube says there are hundreds of people who make more than $100,000 a year on their videos. Baxter says instructional videos are on the rise.
Geoff Dorn knows this market well. He's the man behind a series of videos on how to tie a tie.
In the video, you can't see Dorn's face — just a close-up of his neck, his white dress shirt and pale blue tie. With a monotone voice, he carefully describes the mechanics of the four-in-hand knot.
"That was shot in my kitchen," Dorn says. "I think I tacked a white sheet up against what was a red wall."
That incredibly dry video has been viewed six million times. He also has videos on the full Windsor, the half Windsor, the Shelby knot and the bow tie.
"It's nice to get paid for doing absolutely nothing, or doing something once," Dorn says, adding that he can pay his property taxes each year with the money he gets from Youtube.
He lives in Portland, Ore., and works in finance. And Dorn does actually wear a tie to work every day. But that's not why he decided to make videos about tying ties.
"You know, any entrepreneur gets an idea that they want to make whatever, donuts — they want to make whatever they think they're good at," Dorn says. "But what you really should do is figure out what the market is and make that."
He says he made these videos because he knew there was demand.
While Dorn's videos seem to lack personality by design, Sean Plott's videos embrace it.
Plott has a daily Web show that focuses on the computer game Starcraft II. His mission: helping a growing community of fellow players improve.
In his videos, Plott goes by his gaming handle Day[9]. He says the videos really took off when he started talking more about himself.
Source: YouTube
"It wasn't just Day[9], the analytical nerd who just sat down and only talked about how to improve and how to learn," he says. "It became this edutainment show and that helped tremendously."
So much so that when Plott finishes his master's degree at the University of Southern California later this year, he plans to make this Web show his full-time job.
This week we tackled the basics of video editing with professional video editing software and covered a lot of ground. If you've learned a few things and want to keep learning more, here are some additional resources to help you out.
Before we get into the additional resources, if you want a PDF of all the notes for these lessons you can download it here.
This week we looked at Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, but there are definitely other options for professional-level video editing. Here are a few more pieces of editing software you might want to check out if Final Cut and Premiere aren't doing it for you:
Please suggest others in the comments if you feel they should be included in this list.
If you want to learn more about video editing on various platforms, here are some places to do it:
If you have any other great resources for learning video editing, please share them in the comments.
Now that you've got the basics of HTML and CSS down, we're going to take a look at how to actually use that knowledge to make a real web site. Today, we'll take you through the process of creating a site from start to finish.
This lesson presumes you know how to put together a site layout in Photoshop (or some other application). If you don't, fortunately we've covered that already so you can catch up.
Creating a web site isn't just about coding. You (or someone else) needs to have some basic design skills. You need to know how to prepare graphics for the web. You also need to know a few basic things about web servers to deploy your finished site. We've broken it all up into the four big tasks and take you through the entire process.
By the way, if you want to play around with the source code for our demo web site, you can download it here.
We're not going to get into how to design a web site, technically or artistically. (We've sort of done that already.) You should have your site design figured out already, but there are a few things we do need to talk about before you start figuring out how to translate it into code.
First, the most important thing to know is that your font choices are sort of restricted online. While you can use the @font-face rule in CSS to externally load fonts, this isn't supported by older browsers. You also may need rights to use certain typefaces with this tag. That said, you can use @font-face to solve the problem of limited font choices on the web, but if you're not ready to jump into that world quite yet you should either use a web fonts service like WebType (which can be free depending on your use) or limit yourself to web-safe fonts. Which fonts are web-safe? Times New Roman and Arial are the most common options, but most operating systems come with several other built-in fonts that are considered web-safe. These include fonts like Tahoma, Verdana, Lucida Grande, Gill Sans, Trebuchet MS, Courier New, and Georgia. Do a search for web-safe fonts if you're looking for additional options.
Second, you need to consider what is going to be an image and what isn't. Nowadays you don't really need to use images for much more than complex graphics and photos as HTML and CSS can handle many of the complex things that we used to do with images. Menus, for example, can be created very easily in CSS with an unordered list. Generally you do not need text to be rendered as an image, but there may be some circumstances where you will need to do that (e.g. if the text is combined with a graphic).
Finally, you need to consider which images are going to be displayed as actual images or as backgrounds for one of your DIVs. How do you determine this? If you have text that's going to go on top of an image (e.g. with a menu), then you have your answer: your image will be a background. The reason this is important to know is because you need to export it unadorned with any text, images, or anything you're going to add later in the code. Once you've got that figured out, head on to the next step ("Preparation") where we discuss preparing your layout for coding and exporting any necessary images.
First, you want to measure your design. This is something you generally want to do before you begin your layout, but you need those specific measurements to start coding so you definitely need to know them now. You don't need to know every little measurement, but you need to know the measurements of your main layout structure. For example, if you have a left side of the page and a right side of the page, you should know the width (and height, if it doesn't vary) of each. You should also know the width of the spacing between them and the total width of everything combined. If your design is very much based on a grid and lines up with everything nicely, chances are your site's header will be this width as well. Basically, you need to know the dimensions of every major element on the site. You'll need to know the minor ones, too, but that's not really information you need to get started.
Once you've got your measurements we can start exporting images. In many cases you will not need to export very many images because you can recreate most of your design with HTML and CSS (and JavaScript, if you want to go there). For the few images you do need to export, however, you're going to need to choose between JPEG and PNG. When your images are complex—like photos, or illustrations with many colors and a wide tonal range—you're generally going to be better off with JPEG from a file size standpoint. If you have simple images, or require that your images have a transparent background, you're going to need to save them as 24-bit PNG files.
If you're saving a 24-bit PNG from Photoshop, you'll need to hide the background layer before choosing "Save for Web" from the File menu so Photoshop knows to ignore it.
When you save your images you're going to need somewhere to put them. For this reason, and because you're going to have a bunch of other files once you start developing, you should start organizing your site now. If you were making a more complex site, I'd recommend structuring everything using the Model View Controller (MVC) architecture, but since we're just dealing with a simple site I'd recommend creating the following directories in your site's root directory:
If it isn't obvious, you'll save your images in to the images directory and your CSS stylesheets in the css directory. The scripts directory is where you can store JavaScript files and other scripts you may end up using when developing your site.
In the root directory, you'll also want to make an index.html file in preparation for development. What is index.html? Let's say you only had one HTML file and it was called mydoc.html. If you uploaded that to your web server, which was hosting your site mywebsite.com, anytime someone visited mywebsite.com they would either get a directory listing of the files you've uploaded or possibly nothing at all. Using index.html as a file name tells the web server that it should display that file if someone goes to that specific directory. If you put an index.html file in your images directory, anytime somebody visited http://mywebsite.com/images they'd see a rendering of the HTML contained in that index.html. Basically, an index.html file is the default HTML to display so you're always going to need one.
Now you develop your site using the skills you learned in the past two lessons and the additional HTML and CSS skills you'll acquire as you continue to learn web development. Since we've pretty much covered the basics of HTML and CSS, there isn't much else to say here. Rather than rehash the first two lessons, we're going to go over a couple of extra things you should know before you start developing your site for real and also provide you with the source code for the demo site we created for this lesson.
When creating your HTML document in lesson one, we focused on the basics of HTML structure but not some of the best practices. One thing you want to want to add to the very top of your HTML document is its DocType. You can learn a lot more about DocType on Wikipedia, but it basically is a document type declaration that says "these are the rules I'm following in my HTML document." This is important if you need to validate your code (to see if you made any mistakes), as the rules are a bit different for each DocType, but it also tells the browser what elements and structure to look for when rendering your HTML page. If you don't adhere to the DocType, it can cause problems, so this is something you'll want to explore further. For now, here's a quick look at what a DocType declaration looks like:
As you can see in the video, we used a lot of fun CSS techniques like drop shadows and rounder corners. If you want to explore these techniques further, download the demo site's source code and look around in the CSS. Once you have a grasp on the basics of HTML and CSS, the best way to learn new things is to look at the source code of other web sites. While you can't look at server-side code that was created in a server-side programming language like PHP, you can view HTML source code simply by browsing to a web page and choosing "View Source" from your browser's "View" menu (unless it's in another menu, but it's generally in "View"). Big sites that have lots of content, such as Lifehacker, are not necessarily good models to look at. Much of the HTML code you see here is generated by server-side PHP code. Generally you'll learn more by looking at smaller sites, as the code is often static and/or the site is small enough that the amount of source code isn't horribly overwhelming.
Once you're done developing your site, it's time to deploy it.
Once your web site is finished, you need to deploy it. This often doesn't involve much more than uploading it to your web server. You'll generally accomplish this with FTP or SFTP, so you're going to need an application to do that. We're using Transmit in the video, but Cyberduck is a free file transfer app that runs on both Mac and Windows. All you need to do is use your file transfer application of choice to connect to your web server via FTP. From there, you just copy the files over to the web server and they should be immediately viewable on your web site.
Of course you're going to need a web host to do this, but we'll help you with that tomorrow night. Stay tuned!
Today we have our fourth lesson on the basics of video editing and we'll be taking a look at how you can export your edits to various formats using both Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and Final Cut Pro Studio 3. We'll also take a look at designing video encoding specs so you can make your own. Come on in and let's get started!
The lesson is in the video the notes for this lesson are below. They won't replace the lesson, but you can use them as a sort of cheat sheet to refer back to as you're trying things out in Final Cut or Premiere.
We've already looked at how to export your edit in Final Cut Pro in a couple of ways, and we go over those again in the video associated with this lesson, but there's one more way we haven't looked at: sending your video to Compressor, an encoding application that comes as part of the Final Cut Studio bundle. You do this by opening the sequence you want to send so its visible in your timeline, going to the File menu, then Send To, then choosing Compressor. The Compressor application will launch and you'll see an entry with your sequence in it. Below, you'll find a list of presets you can drag on to your sequence's entry. That same panel will have a tab with preset destinations for the encoded video as well, and you can also drag those on to your sequence's entry. When you've added all the presets you wanted, or added any you created yourself, go ahead and click the Submit button to submit the batch. Compressor will encode all your video and alert you when it's done. When that happens, you'll be able to find all the video in the destinations you selected.
Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 works similarly to Compressor in that it has a partner application called Adobe Media Encoder that handles its encoding. The difference is that you submit your batch and set all your settings directly from Premiere and then add it to the queue. You do this by selecting you various settings, whether they're from a preset or your own creation, and clicking the Queue button at the bottom of the window. If you want to add more tasks to the queue, just keep repeating the export process and queuing them up. You can either start the batch of video encoding tasks directly from Adobe Media Encoder or you can just wait until it starts all by itself.
Encoding is very, very complex, but we're going to talk about a few things so you can get to know how it works just a little bit and maybe create some of your own specifications when the presets just aren't cutting it.
When you encode a video, you're compressing it so it takes up less disk space. There are tons of different codecs that let you do this and many different file formats. For example, H.264 is a codec (and the main one we'll be talking about in this section) and MOV is a file format. H.264 can encode your video, but you've probably seen it delivered as an MOV, AVI, or MP4 file. That's because all these formats can serve as a content container for H.264 video. There's no real significant difference between H.264 files with these various file types, so don't worry too much about how to deliver. My preference is MP4, because pretty much everything can play it, but most video software can handle the other formats too.
When you're encoding video, you're going to be dealing with bit rates. Bit rates are how much data is used for each second of video. Let's say you have a video that was encoded at 1000kbps. Despite what it looks like, that doesn't mean each second of video takes up 1000KB, but rather 125KB. In this case, kbps stands for kilobits per second, not kilobytes. Kilobits are basically eight times the number of kilobytes, so you can get kilobytes per second by dividing your number of kilobytes by eight. If your video was exactly 94 seconds long and encoded at a bit rate of 1000kbps, that means it would be 11.75MB in size. This is all assuming that every second of video equals exactly 1000 kilobits, which is only the case if you encode at a constant bit rate (CBR). CBR encoding is generally used for streaming media to keep the flow of data as consistent as possible, but for progressively downloaded video (what you find on YouTube, Vimeo, and most other video sharing sites) you're better off encoding at a variable bit rate (VBR). VBR encoding can work in a couple of ways, but most encoders just have you specify a single number (in kilobits per second) as the average bit rate. This means that if you specified 1000kbps, each second of the video would be encoded at around 1000kbps. Some seconds of your video will not be as complex as others, so ones with lower complexity won't require all 1000kbps. The ones that require more will take more, and on average this will result in seemingly higher quality video without affecting the file size too much. There's more to it than that, and we get into it more in the video associated with this lesson, but that's the basic idea.
One more thing you should know about encoding is key frames. Pretty much every codec you'll use to export video for the web, DVD, Blu-ray, etc., will have key frames. Codecs that don't use key frames are generally designed for editing purposes because they're less processor-intensive and therefore make editing a bit faster. The DV codec is one such codec. Compare it to H.264 and see how much faster it is when editing. So what are key frames? Key frames are the full picture. Let's say you have 30 frames of video and the first and 30th frame are key frames. You can think of those frames like photos—all the detail of the video exists in that frame. Frames 2 through 29, however, do not have the full picture. Instead, frame 2 just contains the changes that have happened since frame 1 because frame 2 is not a key frame. How often do you need to use key frames? Less often than you'd think. Every six seconds is customary nowadays, but the more key frames you have the easier it is to scrub through the video. The downside is that more key frames tends to result in lower-quality video. Why? Because it takes a lot of data to store a key frame, and if you only have 1000 kilobits (or whatever) every second, the more frames in that second that use a full frame mean you have less room to store the changes between those frames. If you use key frames too frequently it'll degrade the quality of those changes and the quality of those key frames to try and stick to the average bit rate. It may seem like many key frames is better, but you generally just end up with a lot of lower-quality key frames and, therefore, lower quality video.
When designing a specification or a preset of your own, the first thing you need to figure out is how you're delivering your video. If you're delivering it on the web, you're not going to want to target anything slower than the slowest broadband connection because anything at that level isn't really fast enough to handle video worth watching in the first place. (Well, unless it's a cellphone, but we've learned to be patient with those.) The slowest broadband connection you're going to find is probably the 768kbps DSL connection. This is the peak data rate, so if you're thinking you should encode your video at 768kbps you are setting yourself up for trouble. If you're reading this, you're paying for an internet connection. Does it always perform at the peak rate? Probably not. If you want people to be able to progressively download your video in real time you need to take the lowest target connection speed and reduce it by one third. For 768kbps, that's 512kbps, so you want to encode your video at 512kbps. This is really only a useful bit rate for standard definition video and so you shouldn't use it with anything larger than 640x360 or 640x480. Around 1000-1200kbps is a good target video bit rate for 720p files and 1080p should be twice that, if not more. If you're simply creating a source file to upload to YouTube, Vimeo, or some other video service, those bit rates can be much higher because those sites will re-compress the file using their own standards. If that's the case, you should allocate bit rates closer to 3500-4000kbps for 720p and 8000-9000 for 1080p. Since your video is getting compressed for a second time, this extra quality will make a difference in the final product people see when you upload it to a video sharing site. As far as audio goes, I like to use 192kbps for MP3 or AAC audio, although you'll need to keep it to 160kbps if you're encoding for an Apple device. Why? Good question.
All of the suggestions mentioned in the last paragraph are based on the H.264 codec, but they should work well with pretty much any modern codec. The better the codec, the lower the bit rate can be. That means that 512kbps will look a lot better in H.264 than it will if you use a codec that's not as good. Try encoding a file at 512kbps using both H.264 and the standard MPEG4 codec. You'll see a difference, although it may be a little subtle.
Don't screw anything up! Yeah, in a perfect world, right? The thing is, if you shoot crappy video your encode will look even crappier. Sometimes you will shoot crappy video and you won't even realize how crappy it is until you encode it and it looks like someone blurred out all the detail. If you ever feel like your video should look better and it's the fault of the encoding quality, try encoding a well-shot episode of television using the same settings and you'll probably be surprised. A lot of us think out poorly-lit video looks pretty good at 1080p, but that's because you're getting quite a bit of detail at that resolution. That video is also at a really high bit rate, so detail is retained. The more you compress your video the more detail is thrown out, so if your video isn't well shot and lit you're going to lose a lot more detail when encoding than you would if you just shot it properly in the first place. While it's easier said than done, do the best you can do get the highest quality video you can before you bring it into post production. We can do some amazing things in post, but nothing you've learned this week is going to miraculously turn your crappy footage into a work of art. In fact, there's almost nothing you can do to save bad footage regardless of how good you are. You just can't find detail that isn't there. So before you sit down to create your amazing film, how to video, or whatever, take the time to shoot it well with good light or you will be kicking yourself when everything is over. It sucks to put a ton of work into something and then find out it looks terrible when you put it online or on a DVD, so do everything you can to make it look good so you don't have to try to salvage it in post.
That's all for our video editing lessons. Thanks for watching/reading! We'll be following this up tomorrow with a look at some alternative editing software (primarily) for Windows and also provide some additional resources to help you learn more (if you want to). Then, on Monday, we'll provide you with a complete guide and a PDF of all the notes so you have everything handy.
