Adam Wilt at DV.com: “My definition of a professional camera is any camera that lets you do quality work that earns you both money and happy clients. By that measure, the lowly VX1000 is more ‘professional’ than any of the three more expensive, shoulder-mount, interchangeable-lens cameras I’ve had.” Adam has his own excellent site, often linked on DV for Teachers, here.——-
I spoke at length yesterday with a middle school teacher who wanted to set up a PC and a Mac for video editing, and for the PC we ended up favoring the Pinnacle Studio DV Version 7 (now doesn’t that roll trippingly from the tongue). Their 1394 (FireWire) capture card has a low price at $149, with their basic editing app included, so it seems a reasonable price. They’ll need an analog/DV converter along the lines of the Dazzle* Hollywood DV-Bridge or Sony’s DVMC-DA2 (couldn’t find it on the incredibly bewildering Sony site, but it’s available at the Apple Store for Education).
Their blue and white G3 Mac was gathering dust with an Avid editing app and card of some sort, with no one who knows anything about Macs. The teacher doesn’t have the original disks to reinstall from (or hasn’t found them yet) so suggested they buy Mac OS 9 and iMovie and set that up as well. They might also be able to get new disks for the old app from Avid, but we hold out little hope for that. I hope she can keep me posted on how the two systems compare in ease or difficulty of setup, performance, and learning curve for the students.
——-At MacCentral, an Apple exec talks about Final Cut Pro 3 and gives a nice quick overview of some key feature upgrades.
The LAFCPUG has posted their November 28 meeting summary. Make sure to read the section in the middle about Marco Torres, from San Fernando High School:
From a budget of zero he has raised over 4 million dollars and has built a multimedia center called the Community Inspiration Studio that is now one of the best and most advanced in the nation.
Converge Magazine posted this article about Marco and his work. An amazing example of what the right kind of hard work can do. Make sure to look at the work of Marco’s students at the iCan2 Film Festival. You’ll need QuickTime player.
——-MacNN: “Connectix today launched Virtual PC 5.0, an update to its PC emulation environment for the Mac that runs on both Mac OS 9 and OS X.” That means I can run any Windows app on my PowerBook or G4 that I use for editing. My office sometimes uses Publisher, so that’s available to me now. More and more apps for OS X come out every day - this is an exciting time for Mac users and all computer users.
I’m showing weblogs to Joan Williams of Putnam Middle School. She seems impressed! I created a Schoolblog for her.
The Little QuickTime Page has its weekly bunch of updates, including a new beta codec for QuickTime called Microcosm. I know nothing about it yet.
Apple – Final Cut Pro 3: “Final Cut Pro 3 gives you the benefits of the industry’s first out-of-the-box, realtime effects architecture—without the obvious drawbacks of rigid proprietary systems that can cost tens of thousands of dollars more. With Final Cut Pro 3, wipes, dissolves and color correction happen in G4 realtime when using DV and OfflineRT—Apple’s revolutionary new offline format that lets your Power Mac G4 or Titanium PowerBook G4 hold up to five times as much footage as it can with DV—with no PCI card required.”
I think this is huge. The upgrade is inexpensive ($199 for educators and students); they ’ve added incredible features (and OS X support). I want to know what other working pros think, especially in drop-dead-deadline environments.
——-I was just showing someone at the Apple Market Center my page, and I saw that Ken Stone had added a new article about the Tools Palette in Final Cut Pro.
Bill Davis has posted “A Quick Guide to Actually Making Money – Making Videos” at 2-pop.
Going to the Atlanta Apple Market Center for a seminar this morning on Mac OS X Server and its uses. This will I hope give me the background I need to upgrade to the latest version, turn on the Apache web server to mirror our home page, and then install Frontier and Manila so we can host weblogs. Like this one.
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Check out Magnet Media’s Digital media training series. In addition to the Final Cut Pro training mentioned below, they have free online lessons, and for-fee upgrades for more extensive training, in video compression with Cleaner 5, and an overview of video production for streaming.
At LAFCPUG, Tony Donaldson reviews Magnet Media’s Inside Editing with FCP 2: “If you already use FCP, you’ll likely find some great information in the Professional or Platinum edition…. To me, the media management and project setup training is worth the price of admission.”
MacVCD – The video CD Player for your Macintosh: “MacVCD is a software video CD Player that you can use to play VCDs on your Macintosh.”
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