YouTube Now Lets You Search for and Assign Creative Commons Licenses

Creators and remixers now have have a great new option to share and play with content, without worrying about copyright. YouTube has introduced a feature in its Video Editor that allows users to assign a Creative Commons license (CC-BY) to their videos. To mark videos with a CC license, simply click the radio button labeled "Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)" at the time of uploading, or go to My Videos,  select edit for the video for which you wish to assign the CC license, scroll down to Broadcasting and Sharing Options, and select the CC option.

Those wishing to find content they may use under a CC license can find it in the Video Editor by simply clicking the CC tab at the top of the page. You can conduct a keyword search, with only CC-licensed videos appearing among the search results. To add a video to your storyboard, click on the 'plus' symbol (+) and remix away!

For more information, including important details about the rights and responsibilities involved, see YouTube's page on Creative Commons. You can view the terms of the CC-BY license at the Creative Commons Web site.

Got a Video Camera? Got a Tripod? You've Got Yourself a Camera Stabilizer!

On the subject of free video tools, if you already have a tripod you can use it as a camera stabilizer to keep your video camera more steady as you move with it. See this video for a demo from "wbeaty" on YouTube. Check out some of the response videos, like this one, showing this simple principle in action.

Reminder that the VRC lends video cameras and tripods to faculty and students in the Department of Art and Art History. See our Equipment and Classrooms Web page for details.

JayCut: Free Online Video Editing

Do you have some video footage to edit, but no access to editing software? Give JayCut a try. It's a full-featured video editor on the Web.

JayCut's features are surprisingly sophisticated for a free, Web-based application. While it doesn't replace expensive software like Apple Final Cut or Adobe Premiere, it does offer two tracks, to which you can add video clips, audio, text, and transitions. You can also record audio and video directly from your computer's microphone and Webcam. When you have finished editing you have the option to export your video directly to YouTube, or to your computer in the form of an H.264 MPEG-4, H.264 Flash video, or an Xvid AVI file.

If you need to save a project to revisit later, simply create a free account.

JISC Posts New Guides to Moving Images

JISC has just shared three new video guides: the Basic Guide to Videoing Interviews, the Basic Guide to Videoing Lectures, and the Basic Guide to the Flip. These supplement the materials JISC already provides in its Advice on Moving Images page. Here you will find a wealth of information on creating, managing, finding, and using moving image resources. These include the Basic Guide to Shooting Video and many other sections on topics such as digital video file types, animated graphics, metadata, transcoding, digitization workflow, and online delivery options.

Image: Mika Hiironniemi, Video Shoot, 2008. From Flickr, some rights reserved under a Creative Commons license.

ArtBabble: Online Videos About Art

If you are looking for online video content about art, be sure to check out ArtBabble. Launched earlier this spring by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, ArtBabble is "intended to showcase video art content in high quality format from a variety of sources and perspectives."

Now partnering with IMA is Art21, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the New York Public Library. IMA intends to continue adding content from these and other institutions, hoping that it will become an online destination for videos about art.

Videos on the Web site may be found by keyword searching or by browsing different categories. The "Series" tab includes Shaping the New Century: An International Design Symposium, Behind the Scenes at MoMA, Art21--Exclusive, NYPL: Design by the Book, Roman Art from the Louvre Webisodes, and more. The "Channels" tab contains alphabetically arranged keywords for finding content on the site, each of which is accompanied by the number of relevant videos in parentheses. Examples include Ancient Art (17), Ceramics (4), Contemporary Art (93), Exhibitions (51), Film (5), Painting (10), Talks (23), and Video Art (4). The "Artists" tab contains a list of over 150 artists currently represented by videos on the site. This includes contemporary artists, such as Lita Albuquerque, Dawoud Bey, Chuck Close, Ann Hamilton, Jenny Holzer, Alex Katz, William Kentridge, Kerry James Marshall, Pipilotti Rist, Jessica Stockholder, and Richard Tuttle. It also includes some historical figures, such as Georges Braque, Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Gauguin, and Piet Mondrian. The "Partners" tab enables browsing by the project partners listed above.

Twitter Search in Plain English from Common Craft

Common Craft has recently released a new video: Twitter Search in Plain English. As with their other videos, Common Craft uses charming paper prototyping and plain talk to provide an overview of the topic in a short and concise way. It's a follow-up to their Twitter in Plain English introduction.

I have mentioned Common Craft before -- they have created a range of these videos on technology topics such as social bookmarking, RSS feeds, wikis, and podcasting. See their Web site for more examples.

Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video

Not sure what copyrighted materials you can safely use in videos you create and post on YouTube? Take a look at the Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Online Video
from the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property and the Center for Social Media at American University.

Released last year, this document provides best practices in the context of common situations such as commentary or critique; illustration or example; incidental capture of copyrighted materials; reproducing, reposting, or quoting in order to preserve, memorialize, or rescue an experience or event; reposting in order to launch a discussion; and recombining elements to make a new work. It also provides a list of common fair use myths.

To further help online video creators keep within the boundaries of fair use, there is now a short video introducing these principles, Remix Culture: Fair Use Is Your Friend. It uses the language of online video to introduce the concept of fair use within the online video medium, and may be an easier-to-swallow introduction for many people, especially students.

Image: from Remix Culture: Fair Use Is Your Friend.

Via Boing Boing.

Spreadhseet of TED Talks Available Online

The annual TED conference (Technology, Entertainment, Design) features "the world's most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes)." Over 200 of the best talks are available in streaming form on the TED site under a Creative Commons license to allow sharing and reposting. Just about anyone can find TED talks of great interest (the conference's scope has expanded in the last 25 years include technology, entertainment, design, business, science, culture, arts, and global issues), but with so many eclectic choices, deciding which ones to view first can be daunting.

Here is a handy site I came across via LISNews: a spreadsheet of all TED Talks posted through March of this year, including speakers, titles, summaries, durations, and links to the videos available on the TED site. Who is responsible for this resource? I am not sure; it was published on Google Docs and picked up by LISNews after reportedly being tweeted by @joycevalenza, with who knows how many other intermediaries involved. Thank you, whoever you are!

Library of Congress: "YouTube, and Now We Do Too"

Following the success of its Flickr project, the Library of Congress has launched a YouTube channel. Matt Raymond's LOC blog post describes current content and future plans. Now featuring over 70 videos, including the first moving image ever made (Thomas Edison's sneezing man), LOC plans to continue adding files to its YouTube channel over time. As the world's largest repository of audiovisual materials (over 6 million films, broadcasts, and sound recordings), they have plenty of material to share. Raymond reminds us that the American Memory collection provides these and hundreds more videos, of which there are many higher resolution versions available for viewing online.

Start Playing a YouTube Video at the Point of Your Choosing

Have you ever wanted to view a portion a YouTube video starting from any point other than the beginning of the posted video? Here's a great tip I came across in the Resource Shelf newsletter:

You can append to the YouTube URL (Web addess) the minute and second where you would like the video to start playing. The required format is #t=2m50s, where the minute and second values are your choice.

To illustrate, the URL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=io3BrAQl3so becomes http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=io3BrAQl3so#t=2m50s. Voila -- it's that simple.

Image: from Creative Commons - Get Creative, posted on YouTube under a Creative Commons license.