Today’s VloMo video comes courtesy of my Canon Rebel T1i. I’ve never shot a video using my SLR camera before, so I wanted to give it a try. It’s not easy because the camera doesn’t self focus if you move in or out. You have to focus the camera and then shoot, so I have a few blurs in some shots. Oh well. The goal for this year’s VloMo10 is to use every camera I have and every method of making movies I have access to. So today’s movie was made in Windows Live Movie Maker, which by the way, is much improved over the old Windows Movie Maker. Enjoy.

Bartlett Lake Ride (Arizona) from soul4real on Vimeo.

Motorcycle ride out to Bartlett Lake in Scottsdale, AZ. Shot with my ContourHD Helmet cam clamped to the handlebars. Oct. 30, 2010

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

So on Steve’s recommendation, I got on Amazon and ordered me a IPEVO Point 2 View document camera for $65. I ended up paying $75 total because I had to choose expedited shipping. I wanted to make sure I got it in time to try it out before we leave for San Jose, CA next Tuesday for our mobile learning workshop. So although I don’t have an iPad, I do have lots of mobile devices that we will be demonstrating in the workshop, and my co-presenter Lisa Young will have several iPads with her. My IPEVO arrived yesterday, but I waited until this morning to open it and try it out. I literally had the thing out of the box, installed and working in 5 minutes.

We’ll be using Lisa’s MacBook Pro for our presentation computer next week, so I chose to test the camera out on my Mac Mini. I put the CD in the drive, chose Intel Mac over PowerPC Mac, and then clicked the icon once the software loaded. The program opened up and nothing was there. So I plugged the camera into a USB drive and a picture displayed in the program on my screen. It was that easy. The hardest part about the whole thing was sticking the camera onto the bendable display base. I was afraid I might break it since it is plastic.

I made this video to show you how well the camera works. The image is as clear as any image displayed on the ELMO document cameras we have a school, and those cameras cost over $700. The IPEVO is a steal. The displayed image looked great at all resolution settings. Resolution is adjustable to up to 1600 x 1200. It also has a vertical mirror setting so your image doesn’t appear upside down on the screen, and it has an auto focus button the camera and on the screen in the program. That was all I needed. I’ll try Zoom and Exposure later when I need it.

I use my phone everyday, so my picks here a based on that usage. There are many awesome apps available, but I don’t use them every day, so they are not on this list. First, let’s throw out the obvious. Yes, I’m addicted to social media, so Twitter, Foursquare, and Facebook are a given. I use the native apps for all three. I use these three apps more than any of the others aside from Gmail. Another set of obvious picks are Gmail, Google Talk & Google Voice. Come on. It’s not called a Google phone for nothing. Okay it’s not really the Google phone, but close enough.

With the obvious out the way, here are my top 10 Android apps by daily usage.

Soul4real’s Top 10 Android Apps

9 total, 9 free (100%), 0 paid (0%), 7MB total size, $0 total price

• Aldiko Book Reader : Great app for reading ebooks in the epub format. Organizes the books and has lots of features to make reading easier on the small device.
• Barcode Scanner : Handy app for getting more information about something on the web. Just scan the bar code and the web page pops up. Great for downloading new apps.
• Dolphin Browser : Great alternative to the native browser. Allows for pinch and zoom, bookmarking and more.
• PdaNet free edition : Need to connect your laptop to the internet? This is the app for that. Works great. Connect via usb or bluetooth. Pretty fast speeds once connected. This is a must have app.
• RunKeeper Free : Great app for tracking your athletic activities. Uses the GPS to track your every move and then creates a great map to review. Very accurate and keeps track of pace, distance, altitude, speed. Integrates with Google Earth too.
• Pixelpipe Post & Upload Pro : Awesome app for posting to multiple social networking sites. Take a photo and send it to Twitter, Flickr and Facebook at once. Easy to set up pipes and easy to use. Integrates will with all services on the phone.
• PRO Paint Camera : This camera app is far superior than the standard camera app. You can really tell the difference in quality, especially in bright areas. The picture viewer is really cool too once you figure out where it is.
• Dropbox : If you need files from your computer on your phone, this is the app for you. It works great. Let’s you view just about anything you can put in your Dropbox. Must have app.
• YouMail Visual Voicemail Plus : Replaced my Verizon voicemail years ago in favor of YouMail. The Android app works great. Records voicemails and then transcribes them (fee)and sends a notification and an email with the transcript. Excellent visual voicemail.
• Car Home: This app comes standard on your Android phone (except for AT&T), so you won’t find it in the Android Market. It is very cool. Use Voice Search to tell it to navigate to McDonald’s and it uses the GPS to locate you and then finds the closest McDonald’s and gives you turn by turn navigation. When you arrive at your destination it shows a Google image of the front of the location so you know you’re in the right spot. Totally awesome. It does more, but that’s the coolest part for me.

View this app list on AppBrain

Video 1 was shot on my Panasonic HDC-SD5 HD camera. The camera shoots in AVCHD format to a SD card. The resolution is 1920×1080 which I think is full HD. It’s beautiful footage if shot in good light. This first video was shot under the lights of my recording studio (aka my bathroom). The lights are so bright in there it makes a great place to shoot video. I imported the video into my Mac Mini by plugging the SD card into a USB adapter and plugging it into a USB port on the Mac. iMovie pops open and asks which files I’d like to import in the program. I chose the movies files and hit import. Minutes later I was dragging and dropping my files into my movie. For this first movie I used a built in iMovie theme to help with style and transitions. This makes movie creation very easy. When I was finished, I just shared it to YouTube and iMovie did all the rest of work: processing the movie and uploading it to YouTube.

Video 2 was shot with my ContourHD Wearable Camcorder. I just strapped it to a headband and headed off on my hike. It has laser to help you adjust the viewing angles, which is pretty sweet. Once you get going, you hardly realize it’s there. This camera shoots in 720p (1280×720) in MOV file format on a MicroSD memory card. There is software available to work with the camera, but I prefer to use my own. So I just connect the camera to the Mac Mini via a USB cable and follow the same process above.

Video 3 and 4 were shot while I was traveling, so I used a Flip Mino camera. Although there is a Flip Mino HD version, I don’t have it, so these videos were shot in VGA quality. I shot the video and then flipped out the handy dandy USB connector and connected it to my Acer Aspire One netbook. The Flip software pops up and allows me to edit the clips and put a quick movie together and upload to YouTube.

Video 5 didn’t use any video footage, but utilized photos and music to create a video on Animoto. Animoto is very simple. You give it a bunch of pictures and choose a soundtrack, and it gives you a video presentation. So I took photos with my Casio Exilim. Transferred the photos from the camera to the Acer by sticking the SD card in the card reader on the computer. I uploaded the photos to Animoto, added some words, and chose an Animoto song and created the movie. I then exported the completed movie to YouTube.

Videos 6 and 7 were both shot with the Flip Mino again, but this time I used Pinnacle Studio 12 to edit video 6. I needed to change the speed on the video and you can’t do that in the Flip Share software. So I used Pinnacle to speed it up and added background music from the program. Created the movie and then uploaded it to YouTube. Video 7 was created solely in the FlipShare software program that comes with the Flip camera.

Video 8 is a screencapture movie created using Camtasia Studio 6. I recorded the screen as demoed how to create macros in MS Word and then I edited the footage in Camtasia and exported as a mp4 file. I set Camtasia to record in HD so the resulting movie was in HD. I upload that file to YouTube.

Video 9 and 10 is a repeat of Video 1, but I used Pinnacle Studio 12 to edit the movie to include the speed setting in 9. And today’s video, #11, was also shot on the Panasonic HD camera, but editing in iMovie. You can see all of these movies on the Video tab above or click here to go to YouTube.

I’m not sure why November is the month, but it is. It’s the month that thousands of people try to write a 50,000 word novel in the 30 days of November. They call it NaNoWriMo – National Novel Writing Month. Then there is another group participating in NaBloPoMo – National Blog Posting Month. Yeah, they’re goal is to post one blog post a day for the month. I’m not much of a writer, although you’d never know that since I do have 5 blogs that I try to keep updated. But doing a bunch of writing doesn’t sound like fun at all to me, so I opted for VloMo or NaVloPoMo – National Vlog Posting Month. Neither seems to have a website like the others, but the concept is the same. Post a video everyday for the month of November. Vlo is for Vlog or videolog. I opted for the last for my obsession over the next 29 days. I did it last year, so I figured I’d could do it again.

For my cameras, I’ll be using my Panasonic HDC-SD5. It’s a HD digital camera that’s small and sexy. It shoots great video. My first video for VloMo09 was shot using this camera. I also will be using my new ContourHD Helmet cam. It’s also an HD camera and shoots awesome footage. My second VloMo09 is shot using the ContourHD strapped to my head as I hiked the mountain preserve. I’ll also be using my Flip Mino camera, no HD on that one, and my Blackberry Storm camera when I’m desperate.

Now technically I’m participating in NaBloPoMo too since this is my second blog post in as many days. But I don’t know if I really want to keep this up. One more obsession that I’d like to last throughout the month of November is working out. I’ve got two days under belt there too. WhooHoo! Hope I can keep up with that one.