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The FiOS Today Show

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In our Telecomm IV class, our professor tasked us with an unprecedented project. He wanted a presentation on Verizon's FiOS product. That seemed like a logical request, I'm sure, since we are all students in the NSCC NextStep Class of 2008. However, he also wanted me to coordinate the project. I knew it would be extra work, but I had NO IDEA how much extra work would be involved.

We quickly decided we would each do a segment on the FiOS product delivery, either individually or in teams. I wanted a deviance from the usual class presentation of getting up in front of the class and projecting a PowerPoint presentation on the whiteboard, so I decided to make a movie.

After all, how hard can it be?

Well, there is no way to directly export a PowerPoint presentation as a movie, unless you are using a Mac. We aren't.

Also, I had to rely on all the other students/teams getting their work to me on time, which didn't happen.

Then, of course, is the learning curve associated with anything new. This was going to be some curve!

I tried to use Windows Movie Maker to make a movie, and it worked for the first few times. Then, it would churn away for upwards of four hours at a time, only to fail with a cryptic message about not enough space or maybe a corrupted file. All the files were there, they all played in Windows Media Player, and the movide would compile in short segements. I had plenty of space on my laptop. Why wasn't it working. A quick Google turned up lots of other people having the same or similar problems, and at least one private website dedicated to using the program, not sanctioned by M$.

I also found a few programs or methods purporting to be able to convert a powerpoint presentation to a movie, but none seemed to work satisfactorily until one of my classmates came up with his presentation, only a week late but ahead of most others, and complete! Thank you, Derek! He used Camtasia to make his presentation movie. Great!

Meanwhile, I was given some really poor presentations, such as this one, and others that weren't even in the format I needed! When I asked for a re-do, the silence was deafening. Eventually, they came through and I managed to put the 700+ Mb movie onto a dvd. It barely fit on a 4.7Gb dvd! Now, doesn't it seem logical that a file less than a Gb in size would fit on a disk of almost 5Gb? Well, it did to me!

The movie played well on my laptop, and I thought I was ready for the presentation. I burned several copies of the dvd to hand out, and I popped one in the player at the front of the class. The quality was so poor, it was painful to watch! I was devastated. I managed to "Mickey Mouse" together a very painful showing from my laptop and the class suffered through this excruciating ordeal with me. I told the teacher I would have the presentation ready for the last class, but it was too late to give it again in front of the class. My project was in ruins, and I was an abject failure!

Well, as it turns out, the quality is much better when you produce it on 2 disks instead of one! So, this 700Mb file will fit on 9.4Gb of disks! Astounding!

I have the 2-disk dvd assembled and ready to give to the teacher, I also have a couple of extra copies if anyone from the class would like one. Of course, they may duplicate the disks and pass them around on their own, since our laptops are purportedly capable of that task. As an aside, if you are in the market for a new computer or laptop, stay away from this company! Their "tech support" was neither.

Here is the final version of The FiOS Today Show videos. To download the entire presentation to your computer, follow the link above and download everything except the *.zip files. It will fit on a cd, and will play in a browser.

Let me know how it works for you.

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