My head blew up today
As part of Day Two of the DV Revolution Workshop today, Steve Martin the instructor showed how to use stock footage and an eight-point garbage matte in Apple’s Final Cut Pro to make my head blow up in a video. He says DV Creators will post it on their site; I’ll post a link when they do, or post it myself. Pretty neat, seeing your head explode, actually.——-
Steve Jobs to Keynote NECC 2001 Chicago In what I take to be a further attempt to re-woo (‘re-woo’? Is that a word?) the education market, Steve Jobs will give the opening keynote at NECC 2001 in Chicago at the end of June. I’ll be teaching a full-day workshop on digital video – using Apple tools, natch. [shameless plug #2].
DV Revolution Workshop Today through Thursday I’m attending a digital video production workshop presented by DVCreators at the Atlanta Apple Market Center. The presenter is Steve Martin, formerly of The DV Guys. At the DV Guys site, many of Steve’s tips and shortcuts for using Final Cut Pro are available under Digitricks as downloadable QuickTime clips. Very good format; Steve tells me DVCreators.net soon will release a CD of many lessons/tutorials/how-tos in QT clip form. Good.
Another tale of Education Reform in Action
I met a retired Navy Captain at the workshop, who had driven down from North Carolina to take the first day of the three day workshop. I could tell from some of his questions that he was getting frustrated—he had specific questions, and wasn’t satisfied with the answers. It turns out he was there to help his daughter make a video she needs to renew her teaching certificate. He told me that last year North Carolina began requiring teachers, in order to be recertified, to submit a 15 minute video demonstrating certain areas of competency—and provided no resources or training for making the videos.
I don’t know the specifics of the North Carolina situation, but it sounds quite typical. Yes, changes are needed in education, but such poorly thought-out measures do more harm than good.——-
Bruce Johnson describes a possible future of HDTV in the US and sees a grim shakeout, with a number of thoughtful posts in the discussion section. Make sure to read it all.
Bruce works for Wisconsin Public Television, in the depths of Vilas Communication Hall in Madison, where I spent two valuable but intense years earning a degree (not all my shivers are from thoughts of Wisconsin winters).
Weblogs are great tools
Well, it’s working.
Ralph at 2-pop is now wishing he could get Manila’s calendar function there, and the discussion boards are filling with educators offering questions and answers about DV.
I also got a post from Sebastian, asking about capturing a PowerBook’s web-surfing session to DV while also recording users’ remarks. I’ve never tried, and don’t have a PowerBook (yet!), but I think he can record the s-video output and use the play-through option in the sound control panel to record the PB’s mic through to the DV camera’s mic input. I’ll post his results are when I get them. If others have ideas, let me know, and post them to 2-pop’s DV for Teachers board as well.——-
Quite possibly a very cool thing: Open Source solution for live QuickTime streaming on the PC. Because it’s open source, there’s not much detail for non-techies. I haven’t explored it in any depth, so caveat emptor, YMMV, etc.
Thanks to David Carter-Tod’s Serious Instructional Technology page, who in turn gives credit to Wesley Felter’s Hack the Planet. You can tell the stickler academic types: attribution of attribution.
DV for Teachers now on 2-pop! Yesterday, Ralph Fairweather of 2-pop, one of the best sites for DV info on the web, started a discussion board called… (wait for it…) Surprise! ‘DV for Teachers’!
Go there early and often; discussions have already started about storing student DV projects during the term and how to fund projects and labs. 2-pop’s writers and members have a good sense of community, the moderators are very helpful and knowledgeable, and they don’t seem to take themselves too seriously.
DV is too new for their to be too many experts. Almost all of us are making it up as we go along. 2-pop makes for a good group to go along with.
Stream your video as Flash?
NewMedia has a story about Wildform, who have announced a product that ‘’can directly encode video into the SWF Flash format.’’ The idea is to make a video stream easier to send to more users—Flash apparently goes easily through firewalls (I don’t know enough about such things to know if that’s entirely a good thing).
Caution: the Wildform site was slo-o-o-o-w to load when I tried this morning—too many hits from the publicity? Wierdness on my university network? Who knows. The idea is a good one, so I’ll keep trying to load the page and add more comments later.——-
MacNN: Terran Cleaner Review
MacNN has posted a very positive review of Terran Interactive’s Cleaner 5 (formerly Media Cleaner Pro). Though not perfect, especially in the time it takes to render, they recommend it highly for the price.
Latest Final Cut Pro configuration recommendation
Ralph Fairweather, former FCP honcho at Apple and now big kahuna on the 2-pop message boards, has posted what he calls the ‘’best set-up-to-date’’ for Final Cut. He includes step-by-step procedures for a number of configuration scenarios, and precautions to take if you need to revert to your previous setup.
I’ll emphasize here what a great resource 2-pop is – newbies, especially if you phrase your question carefully and thoroughly – are treated gently and patiently. It’s always a good place to lurk looking for insights and tips. Good luck.——-
I’ll be teaching a full-day, hands-on DV workshop at the Chicago NECC conference in June. Workshop descriptions are not online yet, but here’s a basic description:
My Hammer is a Video Camera: DV as a Tool
Video is powerfulóbut many educators can only aim their cameras and hope for the best. Learn new skills for producing and editing professional-looking videos to take full advantage of digital video’s potential as a tool for teaching, learning, and evaluation.
I guess I ought to make a separate page about it, don’t you think? Check back very soon.
iMovie 1.02 back at Apple?
Odd. A MacNN reader reports that iMovie 1.02 is available again for download at Apple, but their report doesn’t have a link to it.
MacNN also links to an Apple Education “Macs in Action” site about a college in New York using digital video as part of training for elementary education majors.
The Computer Learning Foundation’s site is not often updated, but they have some helpful information about Dv for teachers here.——-
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DV Info
HD For Indies
DealNews Low Prices
Creative Cow
LA FCP Users Group
Boston FCP Users Group
DV Workshops’ Online DV Handbook
Yahoo! Groups DV List
Atl FCP User Group
Ripple Training
2-pop
Ken Stone’s FCP
DV.com
QuickTiming.org
FCP at Mac Design Online
DV Guys
dvcreators.net
FCP at WWUG
Instructional Technology
The ITC at GSU
MERLOT
SchoolTV.com
Schoolblogs
Media Literacy Review
EDTECH Listserv
Apple’s Desktop Movies in Education
Serious Instructional Technology
Picture & Sound
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Digital Video gets more powerful and less expensive every day. This site is to help educators get through the difficulty of setting up a system and learning how to use it.——-