DV for Teachers

Charlie White at Digital Media Net’s DV Format: “How to Get Started: Becoming a Pro DV Editor. I Wish I Had An Article Like This When I Was Just Starting Out!“

LAFCPUG Jan 23 02 meeting summary: “FCP Chief Architect and Creator Randy Ubillos paid us a surprise visit this month and we invited him to sit down for a session of Stump the Gurus and show us what was new in FCP 3.0. And he did, and we are grateful.” Lots of tips and info. I guess it’s an LAFCPUG kind of day at DV for Teachers.

2-pop on Making Good Demo Reels: “After all, this is your visual calling card. Every flaw, every less than perfect moment reflects directly on you. And can potentially affect whether you get more work – or starve. No pressure here.”

LAFCPUG: “OK, gang – here we go! Rank your Top 10 Feature Requests in FCP.” Follow the link and vote for the features you’d most like to see. Indications are that Apple is listening, especially to the members (and online friends) of the LA-based Final Cut Pro Users Group. These are the Hollywood folks who are making it an increasingly popular tool in the industry. You’ve almost certainly seen TV edited with Final Cut – and maybe film on a local multiplex screen as well. It’s that good, it’s that popular, and it’s cheap for teachers.

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The Little QuickTime Page has its weekly update for great QuickTime authoring tools.

Internet Archive Movie Collection (0 – B): “This is a multi-page list of all films currently residing on the Internet Moving Images Archive site.” Free downloads of instructional films, newsreels, and corporate propaganda from the last century: GE’s “A is for Atom”; United Fruit’s “About Bananas”; many others. A look at cultural ideas and practices in filmmaking, news, and corporate image making.

Here’s a link to All Movies by Title: “As of January 8, 2002, there were 956 titles available. All films are available for streaming in 450kb/sec (DSL/Cable) or 220kb/sec (Dialup) Real Movie format. All films are also available for download. There are 1128 downloadable .mpg files (some are broken up into multiple parts) and 931 .avi files.”

And here are instructions for downloading and converting, if necessary: “The problem with them is they are so well encoded none of your standard media players will play them for you! Here’s my best responses so far as to how to make these work for your artistic needs. “

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I’m just finishing a DV workshop for some media specialists. Woo hoo.

DV Format has a piece by Willim Gazecki about

Breaking into Documentary Filmmaking: “Getting into documentaries can be viable and attractive for a variety of reasons. The nice thing about it is that it’s still filmmaking. It’s still that craft. It doesn’t carry with it all of the extreme challenges that feature filmmaking brings. “

Gazecki started as a record producer (The Doors, Bette Midler, Joe Cocker, and others), then production work in network TV (“Hill Street Blues,” “thirtysomething”) and now is an independent documentary filmmaker.

As a sidebar to Ken’s article below about voiceovers, I use the iMic Adapter from Griffin. It plugs into a USB port, and within seconds it’s recognized by the system and you can choose it in the Sound control panel. Connect microphones (or any other sound input) and record direct to the internal drive at 44.1 kHz – the same sampling rate as the CDs you buy at the music store. So… hook up some decent mics and record your school’s music programs and sell them to parents as a fund raiser! Little or no processing: capture at that sampling rate and burn right to CD in .aiff (Mac) or .wav (PC) format, and they should play in almost any CD player.

Does Ken Stone ever sleep? Yesterday he posted an explanation of the FCP 3 Voice Over Tool: “Now we can capture Voice Overs directly to the TimeLine and it’s easy to do.” This makes an important part if documentary and instructional video much easier to do. The exceptional tool set in Final Cut Pro keeps getting better, and I still think it’s the best value for educators and students.
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Charles Roberts’“Final Cut Pro 3.0 for OS X: An Ambitious Beginning”, is now posted on 2-pop. I linked to it on LAFCPUG last week.

Welcome to LAFCPUG – Tutorials: “Tutorials are a necessary ingredient in any educational group, and the lafcpug is no exception. With the help of our expert members, we have and will continue to bring you “How2s” on working with FCP, Digital Movie Making, Multimedia, and what ever else we can think of that we believe everyone could benefit from. We also have a complete list of Apple Knowledge Base Document links sorted by date for your troubleshooting pleasure.” Thanks to Michael Horton at LAFCPUG.

I tried the Web Archive feature in Internet Explorer on the Mac this weekend, with some great results. I used it to download the LAFCPUG page with all of its links and graphics and save it to CD. I did it with Ken Stone’s Final Cut Pro page as well. Now I have all of these tutorials accessible anytime, whether I’m online or not. Geez, I love the web.

MacNN: The Macintosh News Network:The new dual 1-GHz processor G4 PowerMac “encodes DVD Video over 300 percent faster than a 2-GHz Pentium 4-based PC.” The base model is 800 MHz with a 40 GB drive and a CD-RW optical drive for $1599 retail. They also offer a 733 MHz PowerMac—through the Education store only—for $1199. An excellent value.

Check out the VideoClix.TV Showcase: “This premier “Video Hotspot” system empowers consumers watching video to click on any items in the video, and purchase the products, play along in a game shows or vote without even having to stop the stream.”

Note the execrable phrase “empowers consumers.” Though I detest that language and the attitudes it implies, their technology opens possibilities for educators to make very highly interactive movies, with links to explanations, definitions, background information. Intriguing. I haven’t inquired about educational pricing, but it’s worth a look if you’re developing educational multimedia. Link via the Apple Developer Connection email newsletter.

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We’re still working on moving equipment around, redoing the edit suite and the lab. As promised, pictures soon, and more posts next week.——-

We’re going to reorganize the edit room and the lab with the editing systems. Pictures when it’s finished.

MPEG Video FAQ from Video Systems magazine. Technical explanations in understandable bits: why and how it works, what it’s good for, and so on. MPEG is coming, folks, so best to know about it so you can tell your students (before they tell you).

The Interface Comprehension Barrier
Some folks here at Georgia State have asked for a Final Cut Pro workshop: people in the School of Art & Design who plan to start working in video, and some students at the student TV station, GSTV. In just 2 hours, I can’t cover much. As I’ve learned in other workshops as instructor and student, the key is to help users get through the interface comprehension barrier.

The barrier is the confusion a person faces when they start a new or upgraded software application. If you haven’t used a program like Photoshop or Dreamweaver or Premiere or Final Cut Pro before, the array of windows and palettes and icons seems like this sentence: overwhelming. Which icons will I use most? Which are esoteric and rarely, if ever, used? And what does that little hand thingie do?

People should get at least one key thing from a workshop: a functional understanding of the key tools a program provides. Ideally, they should also have a small success using those tools during the workshop, and a sense of the more advanced functions as an incentive to go back and try to learn more on their own.

It’s like learning to drive. When you first sat down in a car, you needed to be told that the pedal on the right made it go, and the one on the left made it stop. To move the stick so the pointer is on the “D” for forward and “R” for reverse and “P” for park. To watch the road and all of the rear-view mirrors and use your turn signal and don’t jackrabbit from the stoplight and sheesh, it felt overwhelming. Face it, until you’re used to it, a car has a confusing, too-busy interface. But we get used to it. People routinely can drive, converse, tune the radio, shift gears, watch that knucklehead in the next lane, eat a bagel, drink coffee, chew gum, and if they’re really overdoing it, talk on a cell phone or apply makeup or smoke, all at the same time. Makes working in a Viewer, Canvas, and Timeline seem easy. You just need a little practice. Everything is easier if it isn’t done at 60 mph.

So I’ll set up a quick introductory workshop, and recommend some of the teaching tools I link to here, and ask them to join the discussion and give me feedback on how it’s going. If they do, you’ll know how they’re doing too.

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MPEG Video FAQ from Video Systems magazine. Technical explanations in understandable bits: why and how it works, what it’s good for, and so on. MPEG is coming, folks, so best to know about it so you can tell your students (before they tell you).

The Interface Comprehension Barrier
Some folks here at Georgia State have asked for a Final Cut Pro workshop: people in the School of Art & Design who plan to start working in video, and some students at the student TV station, GSTV. In just 2 hours, I can’t cover much. As I’ve learned in other workshops as instructor and student, the key is to help users get through the interface comprehension barrier.

The barrier is the confusion a person faces when they start a new or upgraded software application. If you haven’t used a program like Photoshop or Dreamweaver or Premiere or Final Cut Pro before, the array of windows and palettes and icons seems like this sentence: overwhelming. Which icons will I use most? Which are esoteric and rarely, if ever, used? And what does that little hand thingie do?

People should get at least one key thing from a workshop: a functional understanding of the key tools a program provides. Ideally, they should also have a small success using those tools during the workshop, and a sense of the more advanced functions as an incentive to go back and try to learn more on their own.

It’s like learning to drive. When you first sat down in a car, you needed to be told that the pedal on the right made it go, and the one on the left made it stop. To move the stick so the pointer is on the “D” for forward and “R” for reverse and “P” for park. To watch the road and all of the rear-view mirrors and use your turn signal and don’t jackrabbit from the stoplight and sheesh, it felt overwhelming. Face it, until you’re used to it, a car has a confusing, too-busy interface. But we get used to it. People routinely can drive, converse, tune the radio, shift gears, watch that knucklehead in the next lane, eat a bagel, drink coffee, chew gum, and if they’re really overdoing it, talk on a cell phone or apply makeup or smoke, all at the same time. Makes working in a Viewer, Canvas, and Timeline seem easy. You just need a little practice. Everything is easier if it isn’t done at 60 mph.

So I’ll set up a quick introductory workshop, and recommend some of the teaching tools I link to here, and ask them to join the discussion and give me feedback on how it’s going. If they do, you’ll know how they’re doing too.

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The Little QuickTime Page has its weekly update.

FCP Tiplets at 2-pop.
Tiplets are little slide shows with audio that explain little but difficult procedures in Final Cut, presented by the training experts at dvcreators.net.

Curved Motion Paths is the new one; check out the others, and make sure you look at the others, both as editing tips and good examples of technology in instrucitonal design.

MacInTouch: Mac news, information and analysis: “WiebeTech’s FireWire KeyChain is a small, self-powered FireWire device utilizing CompactFlash cards for storage. The $99.95 unit measures 1.75” x 2.35” x 0.75”, promises performance up to 5 MB/sec. and is due in March.” Portable storage just got more portable and with faster data transfers… so you can carry a gigabyte of data on your keys: a boot disk, vital files, another level of protection to make sure you have the data you need when you need it. Amazing.

T.H.E. Journal relates the story of a school’s “Sundance Summer” video-making program: “Everything was coming together. We had the equipment we needed and we had a technical advisor. Now we just needed some creative children.” Great story. Many thanks to Apple K-12 Education rep Lisa Dubernard for the link.

Update firmware while booting from OS 9.2 CD.

Users: root is initially given the same password as administrator – change its password! Must use root to install UNIX apps or to install NetBoot.

FTP login problem: old FTP access when activated, started its own services; probably need to just restart FTP server or something else again. reiterated by instructor later

Can’t create new users from scratch in Macintosh Manager. Must use Server Admin app. CAN create Group in Server Admn, and then create user within that group with Mac Manager.

Global Utilities

ACGI Enabler – adds AppleScript/CGI

Console is more inportant under X – keep an eye on all running apps

(others)

FTP——-

Print and keep this one, teachers. Charles Roberts advises on setting up Final Cut Pro 3.0 on OSX in a school lab setting:

“This article is a suggested method of project setup for an NTSC Firewire FCP editing station under Mac OS X. It was developed in a busy multi-user college editing lab. It is a system for ensuring that individual projects are properly configured and that each editor’s work is safe and secure in a lab where many hands pass over one FCP station everyday.”

DV.com has another article about technology changing the industry in The Anatomy Of Digital Cinema:

“Today a complete digital cinema installation in a theater would cost about $200,000 (most of that cost is in the projector). If you want to set up a postproduction house capable of digitizing, encrypting, and previewing digital cinema films, you might have to add another $50,000 to $100,000 on top of that (not including a top-of-the-line telecine machine). Compared to the front-end and back-end costs, the actual transmission or physical distribution from the post houses to the theaters is negligible. We’ll look at how digital cinema proponents plan to deal with these cost issues a little later; but first, let’s take a look at the process and companies involved in a bit more detail.”

Within ten years, maybe less, the nature of film distribution and exhibition could change radically. How will distribution changes affect other aspects: movie-going, production, financing of productions, and so on? Will Kodak effectively transition from chemical-based photographic emulsions to fully digital image capture? Add to that the changes in broadband in homes and web streaming, and the industry could see the biggest shakeup in more than thirty years.

Nels Johnson at DV.com: Filtering Web Media News: “The overused phrase “high-quality video” makes me think low-quality, possibly meaningless verbiage ahead, and perhaps cut and pasted from marketing literature. When I see the words “quarter-screen, 30fps, MPEG-4 video,” I keep reading with great interest because I feel the reporter and editor understand their readers’ sophisticated level.” Guidelines for wading intelligently through the bushwa filling trade papers about streaming media.

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