Staying Safe Online: For the Older Generation

Week 9: Using Digital Video

Task 1: Analyse the Use of Video on the Web

I struggled to identify solid uses of videos directly related to my topic of online safety for older individuals. However, I found two websites in which video was used in different ways, but was still centred around the topic of internet safety.

  1. Website: Internet Day Video Wall

    The way videos are used here are to show the different individuals perspective and opinion on the importance of online safety, this has come in the form of user-submitted videos which showcase information on the topic, often originating from a younger individual.

    The use of video here showcases the wider issue of online safety, as an issue that effects lots of different people, thus showcasing its overall importance as a topic.

    The videos are hard to navigate, but this is the intent; you are supposed to click on random videos from individuals, they are all saying broadly similar information; they just come from a plethora of different individuals. The length of the videos are very suitable, as they are short and easy to click on and off different ones. The videos are organised by topic and contextualised with additional information regarding online safety. Therefore, the videos in combination with text help create a synthesis of information informing the user of the importance of online safety, and its nature as a multifaceted issue that is faced by many differing people.

  2. Website: Cyber Safety Video Series

    The second website offers a more traditional approach to using video within the website. Corroborating textual information and accessible videos on the topic of online safety.

    The videos are used to enhance user comprehension of information, and are individually crafted based on the sub-topic on online safety e.g ‘Ransomeware’ or ‘Social Media safety’. Although the videos are accessible, it would have been better if the videos had been accessible within the browser via an embed link; instead of having to navigate to an external YouTube video. This would have made navigation of the content easy are more accessible, especially to those who are inexperienced at using the internet.

    The videos seem to be the appropriate length of around 1-3 minutes, and are heavily supplemented with other media; primarily text and images.

Following on from this analysis I took time to augment my moodboard which can be accessed here.

Task 2: Generate a portfolio of video content

I searched through and found two videos I feel would be useful in my website, I updated my meta justification able to accomdate these new files which can be accessed here.

The videos are displayed below:

Task 3: Optimising Video

From the videos I had selected from pexels.com I edited these together and combined to make one coherent video, and added effects and sounds. I am well acquainted with video editing software so this proved fairly accessible to me. I then rendered the video in three different formats, HD with highest bitrate available, HD with ‘medium’ bitrate, and 540p with low bitrate. The audio I used is taken from the Portal (Valve inc.) soundtrack which is freely available for use, I feel like it accompanies the video quite well.
This file was rendered as HD at 'high' bitrate.
This file was rendered as HD at 'medium' bitrate.
This file was rendered as SD at 'low' bitrate.

Reflection

Having viewed the exported files and encorporated them into my webpage, I think although the quality of all three of the files is ok, I think I would most likely use the HD 'medium' option, as this has a decently small file size without sacrifing too much quality. If my website was catered to more technology literate individuals I would likely use the top one, as they would be more used to buffering videos.

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