Sunday, January 18, 2009

ideas for web videos

i read a lot of blogs and i've noticed that i actually prefer when the blog/article has pictures instead of videos. actually, videos are great for digging deeper into the topic, but i've found that the videos in blogs slow down reading a lot, because you want to know whats in the video. so, you tend to load up the video and manually fast forward to see if there is anything good in it. this slows down my reading and i hate that. but i continue to do that because sometimes the video is actually way easier to understand than the write up.

to solve those problems i have two visualization ideas for web videos.

skimming for web videos
skimming is a iMovie thing and its pretty cool. basically its a way to explore and preview your video and is a great way quickly identify the best parts of your video. to skim all you have to do is move your mouse horizontally over the video and the video plays back chronologically in respect to the mouse direction. you can also hear the audio while skimming. watch the apple tutorial on skimming

skimming for web videos makes a lot of sense to me. it allows you to quickly find things of interest. perhaps there are technical issues with doing that, for example how to download the data to be able to do that. the whole buffering the video thing really sucks and i hate that i have to do that all the time. not to mention it sort of defeats the purpose of the skimming feature.

a collage of video thumbnails
usually, when you upload a video you can select a single thumbnail of the video to show users what the video is all about. but, i've always wondered why stop at just one thumbnail. what if there were multiple thumbnails that showed snapshots of the highlights of the video. then i can just look at the collage of thumbnails to know what the video was all about. i created an example of my thumbnail collage for this time lapse video:

(my mock up)


compare my mock up with the actual video. i wonder if my thumbnails actually helps. what do you think?


(actual vimeo video)


perhaps there would be away to toggle between skimming and the thumbnail collage. anyway, those were two ideas that i think would help save time while encountering videos on the web. do you think those two features would be useful?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

It would be sweet if the thumbnails enlarged on mouseover. Little too small.

aaron said...

ah.. good idea that would be awesome. imagine if the enlarge over mouse over also worked with the skimming. woah.