I am going to break with my long standing tradition and actually make a New Year’s resolution this year. That resolution is that I plan to finally make good on my past promise to offer our membership videos of our Police Pension Board meetings.
Alright, maybe I’m not the brightest bulb in the box when it comes to video but I have never claimed to be. Some of you may think I am some kind of “computer wizard” because I built and maintain this website for our membership but nothing could be further from the truth about video because it is very hard to teach an old dog (or old guard) new tricks. An old preacher once jokingly said that he defines a “religious zealot” as someone who has just a little bit more religion than he has and I strongly suspect that many of you apply a similar definition to the term “computer wizard.”
My obvious ignorance about video is apparent by the fact that I just recently uploaded my first video [in the right sidebar], that is nothing more than the audio of our last police pension board meeting with a picture of our police patch on it, to YouTube which is something that is easily and frequently done by many children today. For a long time, I had thought it was impossible to use YouTube to host such videos because I believed they only allowed short videos of up to about 20 minutes and most of our pension board meetings are well over an hour in length. However, after examining the congressional video I had on this website, I noticed that it was an hour and fifty-two minutes long and decided to check into just how they managed to do that on YouTube.
What I discovered was a small link near the bottom of the YouTube video upload page that informed me that much longer videos could be uploaded to YouTube if you followed a few additional steps. I clicked that link and followed those steps and “boom,” I had the current video that was also over an hour in length on YouTube. By doing this, I have finally proven that our pension board meetings can be videotaped and uploaded to YouTube after being recorded on a video camcorder.
For that reason, I shall take my video camcorder to our next pension board meeting with the intent of providing our membership with a better “view” of our Pension Board Meetings. I believe it will be much more entertaining and instructive for our membership to actually “see” and hear those meetings rather than simply listening to them on the old audio. Of course, I shall also continue to post the audio of each meeting to this website for those who prefer that method of review.
The reason hosting those videos on this website was a huge problem for me was because of the extreme size of video files. For example, our one hour and thirty-eight minute audio file of the last pension board meeting was just over 45 MB that could be hosted on this website but the resultant video file I ultimately produced from that audio file is over 358 MB that would have eaten up most of our total 500 MB disk space allowed for this entire website. Now, it will not be necessary to host those videos on this website because YouTube will store up to 200 GB of our videos on their website. Of course, the audio file and picture used to create the video that is now on this website required conversion of the audio file to a video format that YouTube liked with Windows Movie Maker. That conversion tied up my computer for over four (4) hours but, after that was done, I uploaded it to YouTube without any further problems.
The video format used by my video camcorder should allow the future video file of our pension meetings to be uploaded to YouTube without the need to process it first with Movie Maker; however even if it doesn’t, I think that having a video of each of our Police Pension Board Meetings will be worth the effort and I should be able to provide links to past pension board videos as well. Now, I only need to get my wife to show me how to use the dang video camcorder that I bought her about three years ago because I have never touched it, except when I bought it.
Keep your fingers crossed that she can teach me how to use it and that I can set it up before our pension meeting because, if I can and the conversion/upload to YouTube can be performed without a hitch, you should be able to actually see that video on this website sometime after our next pension board meeting. Thus, perhaps I will soon prove that old dogs (or old guards) really can learn new tricks and also finally provide our membership with a valuable new service on this website!
Happy New Year!
That is going to be great! So glad you can figure all that out! I do appreciate all you do for us! Happy new year to all!