DV for Teachers

The demo went very well. About 6 people came, a pretty good crowd for these informal events, and kept the presenters well after the scheduled ending time. iMovie was well received by Windows users as well as Mac folk, the Palm demo went well beyond the software I knew about, and the SmartBoard behaved well and showed its potential. A successful presentation.

iMovie & iBook Showcase

I’m making a brief lunchtime presentation to College of Education faculty of iMovie on an iBook today. While two other presenters show SmartBoard technology (the notes and such on a whiteboard saved on the fly as graphics files, even movies, on a connected computer, and the surface of the whiteboard itself acts as a touch-sensitive computer desktop) and Palm uses for teachers, I’ll take some video clips of them and the attendees coming in, and do a quick edit on the fly, and show how easy it is to burn right to a CD.

Nice.——-

New Video Compression Tools

MacNN reports that Sorenson has released new variable-bit-rate video compression software for QuickTime 5 on Mac OS X.

“Logo Bug” How-To

Phillip Hodgetts, a DV Guy and regular contributor to the DV-List and other DV-related newsgroups, posts a tutorial on creating a “logo bug” with Adobe Photoshop and Apple Final Cut Pro. This guy knows his stuff.

Whew, a linky pair of entries today.——-

No DV updates today. I’ve been busy showing teachers weblogs at Schoolblogs.com. You’ve heard it before: amazing possibilities, true cutting-edge tools, empowering the teacher, blah blah blah.

With Weblogs, it’s true. What if I told you that a web page could be easier to create and update than having a hotmail account? It’s true. Check Schoolblogs.com and see what I mean. And tell Peter and Adam that Tim sent you.——-

Irfanview: Cool Free Slideshow/Multimedia Viewer for Windows

Irfanview lets you work with all kinds of multimedia files, but my favorite media specialist uses it for instant slideshows.

After a school event – an assembly, visiting storyteller, field day, pizza at lunch – a 3.5” disk of images becomes a slideshow within a minute, scrolling on the large monitor in the media center. Everyone loves seeing themselves right after an event like that. Check out Irfanview.——-

Free Fonts for Video Titles and Other Uses

This week’s Digital Editor’s email newsletter included this nugget:

Free Fonts
One of the best sites is Fontalicious (www.fontalicious.com/fontext/fontie.htm). A number of share-ware and freeware fonts is The Macintosh Font Vault (www.erik.co.uk/font/). Two other large sites dedicated to fonts include FontFace (www.fontface.com) and FontGarden (www.fontgarden.com).

Even Microsoft gives away free fonts as part of the Typography portion of its site (www.microsoft.com/typography/fontpack/default.htm).

I’m hoping to implement a Search function… stay tuned. Let’s see if it’s working now.

Here’s a link to dvcreators.net. I’m going to see if the search engine sees this link…. Back in a minute.

Nope. Not yet. Still digging.

Yes. It’s a start – the search is set up, but the archives aren’t indexed yet. That means searches of DV for Teachers will only get results from pages posted from today going forward. Good to make progress.——-

I’m showing yet another wide-eyed person the joys of Weblogs. I’m updating it as he watches; look out, Schoolblogs, here comes Francois.

Updating the Mac OS, QuickTime Pro and Installing FCP 2.0 (2.0.2)

Ken Stone’s FCP site just earned its own place in Linkage, to the right. He’s a guru at 2-pop, and his updates are often reposted there and at the LAFCPUG site.

The ITC recently received a new Power Mac 800 mHz dual-processor G4 for our editing projects, and I want to make sure it works smoothly, and I plan to use Ken’s step-by-step to set mine up.——-

Specific Video Compression Settings for CD

Here are some good settings to try if you want to put high-quality video on a CD-ROM. The files can be big (maybe 200MB for just a few minutes) but the picture quality is great, and these CDs should play back on recent model PCs or Macs without a hiccup. Consider this a starting point, because iMovie (and QuickTime Pro) have many very good video compressors, called codecs, for making desktop movie files.

I describe the process using iMovie, but you can do the same export from DV (or other formats) with QuickTime Pro on Windows. Very nice. I’ll talk about Audio file compression another time.

Note: As with all video compression, results can differ widely depending on what makes up the actual video content.Caveat Compressor. (YMMV: Your Mileage May Vary).

It’s a three stage process: Import, Trim (or Trim and Edit, if necessary), and Export to QuickTime.

Import Using iMovie, import the footage. Always start your import a little before the actual starting point you want, and let the import go a little past the ending point you want too. Once it’s imported you easily trim off the extra.

Trim Here’s how: place the playback head (the inverted white triangle under the monitor window) at the first frame of the portion you want to keep. Before your next step, note the timecode of the frame. Choose Split Video Clip at Playhead from the Edit menu. This splits the clip at that point. Repeat to trim off the unwanted beginnings and endings of your clips. Just delete the portions you don’t want to keep.

Export to QuickTime Under the File menu, choose Export Movie… and in the dialogue box that comes up, change Export: To Camera to Export: To QuickTime. Once there, change the default Formats: Web Movie, Small to Formats: Expert….

Now comes the Extra-Neato Cool Secret Whiz-Bang Expert Stuff. Here’s a list of the settings to put in:

Image Settings
Width: 320
Height: 240

Click the Settings… button. Enter these values:

Compressor: Photo-JPEG and Best Depth

Quality: Medium or High (Higher means better picture but bigger file sizes. Remember, YMMV).

Frames per second: 15

You’ll like the results, I think. If you need smaller file sizes but still want the good picture quality, try 10 frames per second, or lower quality, or a frame size of 240×180. It’s all relative. Have fun.

[I’m indebted to Steve Martin of dvcreators.net (see Linkage to the right), who showed these settings in a DV Revolution workshop in January (remember, where my head blew up?)]——-

‘Lockergnome’ Tips and Links

Dave Winer – the guy who makes this website possible – linked to Lockergnome’s 50 tips about Windows XP. Lockergnome covers MSWindows [I’m not linking to them – you know how to find it if you need to] performance and interface issues from a tweaking-your-computer-is-fun point of view. It’s tip-heavy, pretty well written, and they seem to know what they’re talking about. Here’s tip number 30, of particular interest to DV for Teachers:

XP’s movie maker truly sucks; you can’t do ANYTHING with it. No transitions beyond a simple fade, no export options other than Windows Media, etc. Save your money and get a TRUE video editor. Better yet – use iMovie on the Mac. Just don’t think you’re gonna film a businessman flying around your neighborhood and wind up producing an award-winning film using Windows XP. It ain’t gonna happen with this crapplet.

This is why, as a maker of video and multimedia, I like QuickTime.

Lockergnome linked to this free sound effects for spicing up your sound tracks. There’s a link to fee-based royalty-free music, too.——-

The entry below was to demonstrate to a group of teachers taking my web page workshop how easy it is to post a search via a link on your weblog. The workshop description said I’d show them a rubric for evaluating web pages; the link below finds Google’s current results for “rubric+web+design”.

Google links just work
Here’s a sample Google Search.——-

Today I’m recommending that you buy your editing systems from a specific company, based on my experience with them. If you need to buy new computers for editing video and you’re looking beyond the entry-level of iMovie or the basic Pinnacle analog capture systems, take a serious look at Promax. They sell complete Mac (Final Cut Pro) and PC (Avid, Canopus, Premiere) systems already configured and tested, so you unpack the boxes, set them up, and start editing.

They offer education discounts, and all their systems come with one year of toll-free phone support. When we’ve called them for help, an actual human answers the phone. Further, their support people and their President, Charles McConathy, regularly contribute advice and information to the discussions on the DV-List, without hype or marketing baloney. They love the medium, they like the people who work with it, and they act on that.

That’s the real reason I recommend them: they don’t hide behind some corporate facade of “branding” with slick advertising and PR-speak. They do advertise and market, but they never pretend that they’re not talking to people who want to solve problems and tell stories. And they listen. That’s the main reason they participate in the discussion groups: so they know what their customers talk about, what they need and want. Sure, they recommend their own systems, but only when appropriate, and never by unfairly criticizing competitors or their products.

If you’re in the market, give Promax serious consideration.——-