DV for Teachers

Keyboards and Keyframes

Keyboards
Loren S. Miller gives tips on Keyboard shortcuts in Final Cut – essential to learn to make editing quick and intuitive. They make some of the most time-consuming tasks as easy as typing—logging footage, trimming clips, adding compositing layers—some of these are tedious with the mouse, and doing it from the keyboard makes it fly. He has created a free chart (in Adobe’s PDF format for download) indicating all the shortcuts built in, and give some tips on customizing FCP for your own tastes. Really good.

Keyframes
Need help understanding keyframes and how to set them? What do they have to do with shooting (careful, use a different verb in a school! I meant “taping”) the third grade play? If you want decent animated titles, even just fading in and out, you need to know about keyframes. Ken Stone explains at LAFCPUG.

An informal network of sites about Final Cut Pro has formed among 2-pop, the Los Angeles Final Cut Pro Users Groups (LAFCPUG), Ken Stone’s Final Cut Pro site, and DV Guys. 2-pop often re-posts articles and tutorials previously published on one of these other sites, with good attribution, and these experts often contribute to their discussion groups.

I like this idea, as it increases the readership for their expertise and their good ideas—and they do it for free. The people who post these articles make video for a living, and they freely share their knowledge of this complex medium and the complex tools it demands. If you follow any of these links and find the information useful, remember to click through the ads that support the sites, or at a minimum, write to them and thank them.

And if you write about them on the web yourself, remember to link to them too. The web makes that easy.
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Weblogs and Updates

I have to remember not to hit the button to update the home page without links ready to go! Please come back Monday. Thanks.——-

Thanks for your patience – still catching up after the long time away. Updates resume later this week.
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Dreamweaver Workshop Today

No video updates today – I’m teaching a workshop on Macromedia’s Dreamweaver, a great WYSIWYG Web editing application.——-

DV and Teachers in Action

One of our Instructional Technology faculty is teaching a group of media specialists how to do basic video production editing, using Canon ZR30MC cameras and Apple iBooks, with iMovie software for editing and Disc Burner for putting their work on Cd-ROM and turning it in. I hope to follow up with impressions and critiques from the students. Illuminating.——-

Judy and Robert Come Through

Authors of The Little QuickTime Page, Judith Stern and Robert Lettieri’s new QuickTime book has finally arrived, and it’s worth it to understand the features and capabilities of this unique technology.

Here are a couple of key quotes from their book; this one explains a helpful way to think about QuickTime:

Unlike most pieces of software, QuickTime isn’t an application but an enabling technology: If it’s installed on your system, it enables many other programs to provide important multimedia features. QuickTime enables other software to handle multimedia data (for example, video, audio and animation) gracefully and simply. It allows media to be viewed, edited, combined, transformed, and manipulated in whatever way an artist, teacher, communicator, business-person, video professional, or kid sees fit.

Understanding it as such an enabling technology rather than just as a plug-in or application clarifies its usefulness and its importance.

The other quote explains a key aspect of QuickTime technology that sets it apart from RealMedia and Windows Media:

One QuickTime advantage for Web developers is that QuickTime movies can be reencoded as RealMedia or Windows Media files. This means that if you first create QuickTime movies, you can later decide to also offer RealMedia or Windows Media versions. RealMedia or Windows Media files, on the other hand, can’t be reencoded in any other format.

There is so much else worth knowing about QuickTime, regardless of which format you or your organization finally use – learning about QuickTime with this great book will make you a better creator of any multimedia technology.——-

Back on the Ranch

I’m back – tanned, rested, and ready, from the long vacation following the NECC conference in Chicago. I’ll post some brief updates later today after sifting the 106 emails and the yet-uncounted phone messages and sorting through the stacks of messages and memos on my desk and prioritizing the installation of the software that finally came in and….

You get the idea.——-