These are more notes from 2011, and are the various strategies and things I’ve learned through using Korsakow that make using the program simpler, or at least easier.

To really understand what you’re doing (if you are interested, otherwise potter around), then read the Korsakow manual, the faq, the quick-start guide, tips and tricks, and tutorials. These will be more up to date than mine below, which are largely based on the common problems that seem to have turned up in classes.

1. Some simple interface options. The interface editor in Korsakow has an element that is called “Media Area”. This is a widget you can drag onto your interface and you can then use it to display other media. I haven’t played with it much yet but if imagine you made a graphic in Photoshop, might be the title of your work in some fancy font. Save it as a jpeg, add it to your project library, and then drag Media Area onto your interface. The properties tab (in the interface editor) lists all the jpegs in your project, just choose the imagine you just added. It is now part of your interface.
2. Editing the k-film web page. When you export a k-film a new index.html file is always generated. This is, of course, a standard webpage and is what is loaded in a web browser for the k-film to load and play. You open this page in a HTML editor (personally I’d use a text editor like TextWrangler) and change it. This is one of the benefits of learning a bit of the source code that we teach in networked media. If you’re not sure what to do, experiment. Make some changes, save it, and open it in the web browser. If it breaks and is all a disaster and you didn’t keep a copy of the index.html file then just do another export from within your Korsakow project and a nice new one will be generated for you. The simplest change you can make is to find the bit of text that says “made with Korsakow” and change that. Perhaps your name? URL of your blog? Title of the work?
3. Dense nodes. One way to make connections between clouds in your k-film is to use dense (dense in the sense of thickly linked with keywords) nodes that work like ‘hubs’ that join or connect different clouds together. I’ve written about this in more detail nearby.
4. Export as you go (the quick way). Korsakow now lets you do a low res export, or the usual export to web. A tip. Ignore low res export because if you choose to do this it exports everything, every time. You are much better off setting your compressing settings to the lowest quality, doing an export for the web, and then as you add more media do the web export. That way you get the dialog box that asks you if you want to redo everything or any the new additions. Choose new stuff and things export much much faster. This is also how you can easily test interface changes, and make minor changes to keywords and so on. These changes don’t require video to be added or recompressed, so are exported very very quickly and you can then look at the work to see what differences your changes have made.
5. NAME YOUR PROJECT. Yes, that is yelling. Why have no title for your project? Why publish it as ‘untitled’. It is your work, give it a name. Also the title of a work can do.
6. Transcoding. Transcoding is what Korsakow does when you export a project. It takes the media you have added to the project and recodes (recompresses and changes the file format) to FLV using what you have selected under File – Project Settings – Export. This takes ages, literally if you have a lot of video it can take hours. So be prepared for this.
7. Export a project but nothing appears. If you load up a project with video, but have not added any keywords in or out (‘snuified’) the clips, then when you export your project to the web and go to play it there will be nothing visible. Your video will be transcoded, but nothing appears because it needs clips with rules (keywords) attached to build anything.
8. Compression settings for export (File – Project Settings – Export). H.264 medium currently provides the best compression options (file size versus quality). If you want to be low rez (compression artefacts, etc) then use the low resolution H.264 project settings.
9. Thumbnail videos. Don’t use the video you add to provide thumbnails. They are large files and it is very (very) inefficient to use these as thumbnails – people will be downloading something the size of an elephant when it should be a mouse. This matters because we all pay for bandwidth, so please don’t expect people to have to pay for elephants to buy a mouse. If you want video thumbnails then compress your video a second time to the size of your thumbnails.
10. Start simple. Complex structure is created by the repeated application of simple rules. Use this when thinking about keywords. Don’t use 20, use 4, build, export, test. Then think about what changes you might need.
11. Korsakow is only for authoring. This means you make content – video, still images, audio, outside of Korsakow using whatever software takes your fancy. What you bring into Korsakow is your media already to go. You don’t make video edits in Korsakow (well, in my terms you make edits possible via the keyword link structure, but that’s a different kettle of fish entirely to editing a movie in the usual sense of the word). So all the media your bring into your project should already be the right size for your project, the right compression, and in the format and data rate that you want. You NEVER bring in something bigger and then make it smaller within Korsakow (for instance a video that is 1280 x 720 that you then present as 640 x 360). This slows things down since heaps more is being downloaded to be played than necessary, and is, well, the digital equivalent of picking your nose at the dinner table (seriously, that is how uncool it is).
12. Use this as part of an iterative process. This means do not think you can plan your Korsakow project on paper, or somewhere else, and then you will just import your media and link according to your plan. You can try to work like this, but that is a bit like thinking you can write music by writing each instrument and not listening to them all together, and not actually playing music while you’re writing music. Or it is like writing something in Word, then exporting it as HTML, and then telling yourself that you are writing hypertext. No. You need to work within the medium to be working in that medium. And you need to work in that medium to learn how to work in that medium. You don’t learn how to play a piano by reading about it, watching others, watching a DVD, or writing out instructions on paper. You have to play. So it is with Korsakow. But there is more to it than just having to use it to learn it. There is a logic to the tool which you can only use if you work in the tool. So the way to make a project is to add some media, add keywords, export, and play the work. How’s it going? What happens? Does it do things you didn’t expect? Good things or bad things? This is really much easier to do when the project is small, when you can try things out easily, and then as you develop an understanding of the shape,patterns, and behaviour of your project you can add more media, and keywords, and then export and evaluate the work. This is what I mean by an iterative process. You add some stuff, you evaluate, you make changes. It is built up through small steps, small increments. This might be unusual for mamy of you. In TV you are taught to script, storyboard, and then use that as your plan. In essay writing you prepare an essay plan and use that to build from. Here it is much much more organic. Personally I’d describe it as more like writing a song. Add a line, sing it, fiddle with it a bit more, back to the music. You sort of have an idea of what it is about, or where it comes from, but there is no strict plan or map.
13. Do low res exports. Part of this iterative process is to add, keyword, add SNU ratings and so on, and then export to test and see what is going on. (Again, think of this exporting and viewing as what you would do in radio or TV, you do an edit, then you look at the shots, or listen to your piece, with your new edit. You don’t just keep editing to the end then check that the edits are OK, same process for making a k-film.) So, exporting can be slow since the Korsakow engine will take your video and audio, and then transcode and recompress it. This is slow work. So for work in progress when you export go into File – Project Settings – Export and choose FLV Low. This will export much more quickly, and yes it will be low quality but this is drafting. The final export or for publication of work in progress you will change the Export settings to a higher quality and re-export. But remember, if you have a lot of material this will take a lot of time. (And this is also why you must always have your original media, if you have moved it, deleted it, renamed it, then there is no way for Korsakow to export and render a better quality version because it can’t find the source media.)
14. Complexity comes from the iteration of a simple structure (or rule). You build complex structures (patterns) in a k-film not by using a lot of keywords but by defining and applying a simple set of rules, consistently.
15. What happens if the source videos are different dimensions? A mess. In a word, well two. The software is designed to support video that, more or less, is at the same dimensions. Being smaller might not be a problem, it might just be presented larger, or you can put a background behind it to make it fill the frame. I suspect (but haven’t tested) that the default behaviour will be to fill the video screen you have defined. So if it is a different aspect ratio (which is a much bigger problem than a different resolution) then it will be stretched, or squashed to fix. Work arounds would probably be to use Compressor to crop the video to get it to the right aspect ratio and/or dimensions.
16. Read the error messages. Yes, Korsakow is low budget software so you can’t export the sort of design, support and so on you get for either very large open source projects (WordPress for example) or commercial software. However, pay attention to error messages you get, while cryptic they usually point to what is going on. For example if you get an error message about a file type being not supported or corrupt it will tell you which file. Remove the file from your project. If the export now completes there is something wrong with the file. There are a lot of examples like, this, so read the error as it does give good clues as to what might be going on.
17. Thumbnails can be video or jpegs. Video thumbnails are very cool, because when you mouse into them they play. But this seriously increases the bandwidth demands of your project. If you are going to use video thumbnails then it is essential that they are recompressed to a suitable size and data rate. This means they get recompressed to the size of the thumbnail. You NEVER compress video to, say, 320 x 240 if it is going to be displayed at 160 x 120. Why? Because the larger video requires four times as data as the smaller. It is about bandwidth which becomes about how much data has to arrive at your viewer’s computer before they can do anything. The more you can minimise this (the less data that has to arrive) the better off you are.