DV for Teachers

DV.com: The Fundamentals of Color-Correction: “Although professional colorists spend a lifetime perfecting their craft, I’ll try to open the door to the potential of color-correction tools in this article. A subsequent article will provide tutorials that show you how to solve common color problems.” I haven’t read it yet, but it promises to teach a lot, and if it’s as good as DV.com’s usual articles, it’ll be worth archiving for teachers of broadcast production and any producer of video.——-

I just used the
Image Filter tips at Ken Stone’s excellent Final Cut site to color-correct some footage shot with egregious white balance problems. The render will take a while, but finding really good settings to correct the problem only took a couple of minutes with this page’s help. Nice.

Adam Wilt, DV expert, professional camera operator and editor, flamewar firefighter, and extremely nice person, has updated his incredibly informative DV, DVCAM, & DVCPRO Formats—tech details, FAQ, and links page.

DV.com’s DV Expo starts next Tuesday in Los Angeles. Apple’s Phil Schiller, VP or Worldwide Marketing for Apple, gives the keynote that afternoon; probably no major new product announcements without Steve Jobs there, but then again….

 

Dave Nagel of the Digital Webcast section of Digital Media Net gushes over the Channel Storm Live Channel Pro 1.2:

“Live Channel is, in fact, a real-time QuickTime streaming front end, server and studio all wrapped up into a package no larger than 900 KB-including the documentation files. When I say “real time,” I’m not just referring to playing a QuickTime movie in real time. Even the basic QuickTime Player application can do this. I’m talking about multiple QuickTime files, multiple audio files, multiple graphics, multiple live video and audio feeds and multiple overlays, all of which can be switched in real time, combined in real time and transitioned in real time-dissolves, wipes, you name it. All in software. And all in a package, once again, smaller than 1 MB. To hammer the point home, this entire broadcast studio and streaming server can fit on a floppy disk with room to spare. You do remember what a floppy disk was, don’t you?”

 

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I’m just finishing the seminar, and showing my weblog to John Lilly. He’s going to show me WebConfidential.

I’m off to an AppleScript seminar at the local Apple Market Center.

Macnn has a pointer to the Seagull Video Player, a $20 shareware app which plays QT movies full-screen.

The Little QuickTime Page has more QuickTime news and utilities updates.

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Macintouch has updated an ongoing Reader Report on Recording Audio. Posts include tips on using Sony MiniDisc audio recorders, recording directly to a Mac, microphone selection, and tips for good results.

Ken Stone’s Final Cut Pro has a couple of new articles. “Glow Video, Glow – Creating Boris Glow Effects” by Tim Wilson, if you use or want to use one of the Boris family of effects generators, and “Cutting To The Beat with FCP” by Kevin ‘Telly’ Monahan, about techniques for editing a music video. Cutting to a music track is a great exercise for learning editors, and this article shows a number of techniques and FCP features that can be used for other purposes.
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dvcreators.net has released their “Making Awesome iMovies” CD. I have their “Secrets of Final Cut Pro vol. 1” CD and it’s great.

Lots of great updates, once again, from Judy and Robert at The Little QuickTime Page. In particular: a link to a comparison of QuickTime, Windows Media, and Real at streamingmedia.com.

MacInTouch: Mac news, information and analysis: “Version 5.1 of Discreet’s Cleaner streaming video compression software, formerly from Media 100, features improved support for QuickTime 5 along with added support for the Sorenson Video 3 Professional, Windows Media 8 and RealSystem 8.5.1 codecs.”——-

Adam Curry’s Weblog: Mobile Data Mind Bomb: Adam thinks through the possibilities of the Mine:

“it helps you collect, organize and transport up to 10 Gigabytes of data. It has special functions for your most used data, like being able to play mp3’s to any audio system, showing picture slideshows on any tv set and, get this, it can email files and act as a standalone fileserver via dialup or ethernet.”

And this is only first-generation technology – Apple’s similar but less capable iPod is Firewire, and the Mine is USB-connected and can use a wireless LAN in its PCMCIA slot. Combine higher speed second-generation WiFi with this machine’s other capabilities, add a color Palm- or PocketPC-like screen and a Blackberry-like thumbable keyboard, and even laptops would become specialized tools only needed by graphic designers who work in coffee shops. But for education: what if your students had one of these—for video projects as well as their other data? Backup and synchronize at home and school morning and evening in moments. Wirelessly present QuickTime versions of videos, presentations, audio; submit written assignment over the network to be printed only if necessary; when synching, assignments could automatically load to the students’ drives, complete with due dates entered in their calendar databases and interim progress points and notifiers as well. I can’t think of all the possibilities. This is, as Adam and Dave Winer (Manila’s daddy) call it, a “Mind Bomb.”——-

MacNN: “Mediafour announces XPod software for iPod” so you can connect an iPod to a Windows machine… it’s getting better all the time, folks.

Just fixed the broken Linkage (second link on the right) to the University of Oregon’s Media Literacy Online Project. Please be sure to check it out their Media Literacy Review:

“The second feature section of the Media Literacy Review focuses on non-fiction film. A comprehensive collection of article links related to documentary and ethnographic film provide a rich background on a film format popular with media educators. There are also resources related to film making and the grammer of film.”

 

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DV.com’s Downloads Page: “You can find all the downloads and project files referred to in DV Magazine on this page.” Top notch tutorials from among the best of the best in motion graphics and audio for DV.

LAFCPUG – Basics of Final Cut Pro: Matte Filters: Ken Stone has another good tutorial.

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Macintouch Reader Report: Recording Audio. Audio is the hugely under-appreciated aspect of video. People won’t watch great video for long if it has lousy audio. This discussion at the reliable Macintouch site covers numerous ways from the nearly free to nearly state-of-the-art for getting excellent recordings directly into a Mac.

I applied online for a part-time sales position at the not-yet-open Apple Store in Atlanta’s Lenox Square Mall.

The Little QuickTime Page has its usual slew (or is it a spate? I’ll have to look those up) of good QuickTime links: a text track creation tool, a QuickTime community called Friends of Time, a Windows screen capture tool that can output QuickTime movies (this could be ve-e-e-ry nice), and a couple of tools for making QuickTime panoramas.

Please buy Judy and Robert’s QuickTime Pro book. It’s an excellent resource for learning about multimedia creation methods and presentation on Windows and Mac. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

The Arizona Republic: DV students learning lessons through laptops. “His class used the iBooks last year to produce a video on nutrition that was shown to the student body.”

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John Robb’s Radio Weblog: ”
Digital Video for teachers Weblog.” I got a link from Userland’s COO. Userland makes the software that makes this weblog run, and they host it for me too. For free. Thanks.

Microsoft Producer for PowerPoint version 2002 “It helps you capture, synchronize, and publish audio, video, slides, and imagesóresulting in engaging rich-media presentations viewable on demand in a Web browser.”

Hmm. The feature description says it can capture video from a DirectShow supported capture device. Do you have a DirectShow supported capture device? ——-