DV for Teachers

Happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.——-

I added a link to O’Reilly’s iMovie 2: The Missing Manual on the left. I’ll add more a little at a time.

To Do: Add list of permanent links to book and CD teaching aids for video: Missing Manuals, Peachpit Press visual Quickstart books, etc.

Macworld: “Toshiba has announced 10 and 20GB versions of its 1.8-inch drives, the 5GB versions of which are employed in Apple’s iPod and SmartDisk’s FireFly drives.” Think about it. You’re teaching students video editing and production. With one of these, they can keep 45 minutes of DV formatted video on a 20 GB drive they can carry in a shirt pocket, still have plenty of room for other document files, carry hours worth of MP3s, AND boot from it, too. Yow.

Videography DigitalFilm Tree Follows ‘Rules of Attraction’: “The film, which Lions Gate expects to release in April 2002, is the first studio-backed feature to be edited entirely with Final Cut Pro.” A professional tool, no kidding.

Philip – a student assistant here at the ITC – had a very sharp comment. I mentioned the story about movie file sharing below, and started to speculate about how it will change the film and TV industry. He thinks the industry will give much more money to Congress and to candidates who will seek to make more severe penalties for file sharing, leading to more constitutional tests of them. Hmm, says I, adding to that an FCC chairman, Michael Powell, who seems eager to allow media congomerates to concentrate their ownership locally, nationally, and internationally. Now include two media congloms—AOL Time Warner and Microsoft—both of which would dearly love to make every single web click a financial transaction they get paid for, and they are perfectly happy to use the file-sharing controversy as cover for this, their true goal. It’s a real struggle, and the BigCos and government are on the same side.

New York Times Black Hawk Download: Pirated Videos Thrive Online: “More than a million users are usually online with Morpheus, and on a typical evening the download options include nearly every “Simpsons” episode ever broadcast; film classics like “Breakfast at Tiffany’s”; episodes of “The Sopranos”; “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” now in theaters; and a wide selection of pornography.” Legal or not, this is the world which student filmmakers live in, and as a result the business of film and video is changing in ways we can’t predict.

2-pop: Inside Editing With Final Cut Pro 2: “I spent over three hours learning stuff I didn’t know, but learned I needed too.” Tony Donaldson reviews a set of FCP training CDs that expand on other training materials. He likes it.

I keep looking at the DV sites I know, looking for new things to post. There just isn’t that much news today, I guess.

MultiMedia Schools Magazine Digital Storytelling Finds Its Place in the Classroom: “One student captured it best: “This year I have learned that places are not just physical matter but emotional places in peoples’ hearts. iMovie has made all my thoughts and feelings come alive in an awesome movie.”

Apple Education Desktop Video Lesson Plans:

Indicates that standards correlation for this unit is complete and detailed state and national standards are available for viewing.

The Little QuickTime Page has its post-Macworld update, and Judy and Robert have included the list of Cool Tools for QuickTime from their Macworld presentation.

workingmac.com John Welch gives us his Macworld Keynote analysis, part two. “FCP: Where’s the scripting? The Final Cut Pro demo was nice. There are, according to my video editing friends, some rather serious upgrades in the application that will make it a compelling upgrade. But I still see the lack of AppleScript support as a real mistake.” He makes good, pointed comments about how pros use such software and how scripting makes repetitive tasks much easier. Apple seems to be making a huge push on AppleScript, and I think it will come. NAB seems a good place to announce it.

Bangor Daily NEWS: “Maine laptop plan moves closer to reality” – imagine each student using a tool equipped with iMovie. In math, what real-world problems could you give them, so they could make a video explaining the answer? What about history? Any other subject. We are making this up as we go along, and I like all the possibilities.

Gary of the Videoguys: The Electronic Mailbox – Free Download Page: “I have searched the internet for FREE trial and evaluation versions of software I feel is useful for digital videographers.” Lots of good demo, shareware and freeware tools.

 Ken Stone: “Final Cut Pro 3 ships with Boris Calligraphy, two Text Generators, Title 3D and Title Crawl. ... Together they help fill one of the biggest needs that FCP users have had, better text tools.” It just keeps getting better. For the money, is there a better, more stable high-end editing program for educators?

Wow – too busy to update until after 5 pm. The Dual 800 mHz G4 has a new logic board, and such failures aren’t common but aren’t unusual either. It happens, apparently, and getting it fixed on-site makes the AppleCare worthwhile. Thanks to Larry of AIS Computers.

I spent the rest of the day helping a professor capture some audio files from a tape deck through a Griffin iMic (really a great little thing) to disk with the freeware Sound Recorder, edit them in QuickTime Pro, and burn them to CD with Toast Titanium. We did it all on an iMac running OS 9 and with an external Firewire CD burner from Que! (yes, the exclamation point is part of the brand name. Annoying, but the burner works great).

It was easy. we set the sampling rate during the recording to 44.1 kHz, the native rate for audio CDs, and once captured, trimmed the dead air from the beginnings and ends of the clips, and voila. Dragged the files into the Toast window, clicked Record > Write Session. Now, I want to get my old vinyl out and make some CDs. Little Feat, Robert Palmer, Santana, the Crusaders… oops, not strictly DV for Teachers. See you tomorrow.

Another reason to ride the subway. An underground zoetrope: “Between the Dunwoody and Sandy Springs subway stations on the North Line of the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), commuters shoot past an ad for Coca-Cola’s Dasani bottled water at 40mph to 50mph. But it’s not gone in the blink of an eye. At about 1,000ft. long, the advertisement is composed of 4,800 transparent frames arranged in a series of rear-lit, 3ft.-long lightboxes. These horizontally compressed frames play to the straphanger as a :20 full-motion video.” I thought I saw something when I rode that part of the line last month for a FCP3 demo at the Atlanta Apple Market Center. I’ll ride it again just to see this and report back on how it looks.

John Jackman at DV.com: “The Real Meaning of Real” looks at three “realtime” boards: “Yes, this new group of DV boards will display certain effects and transitions in realtime to the analog outputs, but everything must be rendered for 1394 output to DV tape. Because just about everyone I know who does DV-based production shoots in DV and outputs back to DV, what these boards provide amounts to a realtime preview.” A clear-eyed look at what the manufacturers say and what the boards actually do in the edit suite, and worth reading. If you’re making video for CD-ROM or Web, this can be a huge timesaver.

Jay Rose, audio columnist at DV.com, on techniques for your throat to help make good voiceovers. “Many of the principles are easy to master: Learn them and you’ll do a better job if you have to narrate your own film. You’ll also understand what skilled announcers are doing, making you a better director.” Yet another area overlooked in beginning video.

Adam Wilt has posted his DV Expo 2001 course handouts, as well as other site updates. He works harder to share his knowledge about the many possibilities and parameters of DV than anyone I can think of.

More on my Firewire saga here. One of the sad things about the losing my main edit machine is I have to wait to upgrade to FCP3, which arrived Wednesday, the same day the FW went out. [insert monosyllable indicating disgust.] But I will have the singular pleasure of upgrading it on the PowerBook. That could be a saga of its own.

I’ll keep my notes (except for serial numbers and other confidential info) on this page.

I tried –

• rebooting
  
• updating from 9.1 to 9.2
  
• testing cables & drives on different CPUs
  
• running the Hardware Diagnosis CD
  
• checking the FW card – but it’s on the motherboard, not a separate PCI card

It’s Friday morning, and I’m waiting for Deborah the help desk person to come back. We’ve tried:

• restarts after changing extensions to “All” and “Base”
  
• resetting Open Firmware (restarting while holding down Command-Option-O-F keys)
  
• checking the Apple System Profiler

Nothing helped. While talking to Deborah, the machine put itself to sleep, and upon waking the Apple System Profiler quit with a Type 11 error, which she said is likely due to the hardware error causing the FW to go down.

Another weird thing happened: I moved the box to my cube from the edit room so I could use the speaker phone when waiting on hold. I hooked it up to a 17” Dell-Trinitron monitor (I usually have it on a monster 21” Dell-Trinitron) and chose a very high, but ”recommended”, resolutions – I think it was 1600×1200. I know that’s too small to use, but I wanted to see. It scrambled the screen and didn’t switch back. I managed to open the Monitors Control Panel, and had a series of illegible ghost windows smeared across what must have been the desktop, only one of which was the actual window. By trial and error clicking, I found a different setting and switched it back. Video card problem? Monitor problem? She’s putting a note in the file, but doesn’t think it’s a hardware problem. When stuck in an unusable resolution, she said resetting the P-RAM should reset it to a low-resolution default.

The case has been referred to AIS Computers here in Atlanta; they should get the part Monday (overnight) and call me within 1-2 business days from today. Heh – I’m calling them this morning to try to set the appointment.

They set up an appointment (conditionally) for Monday afternoon.

The Firewire ports on our Macintosh 800 mHz Dual Processor have stopped working. They supply power to a Firewire bus-powered drive I have, but won’t mount it or a 45 GB powered FW drive. Both drives and cables work with the PowerBook 400 mHz. Tried a clean install of OS 9.2; no change. Looked inside the case to make sure the board is firmly mounted, but the big chunky heat sinks on the processors block the way. So, Apple support is next. They open at the same time I arrive at work. I hope they’re awake; I will be. I’ll track developments here.

PC Magazine reviews six media players. The emphasis is on the end-user’s experience (don’t you just love that phrase? yecch), with little discussion of applicability on older systems, or about authoring for any of these platforms. Useful information but not authoritative. 

Yow. Hitachi’s DZ-MV100ADO “digital camcorder is a single chip camera that can record up to 2 hours of full motion MPEG2 video at 352×480 resolution or up to 1 hour of full motion MPEG2 video at 704×480 resolution or nearly 2000 mega-pixel still images at 1280×960 resolution using both sides of the disc.” Hmm. What editing application edits MPEG-2 video? I have to find out.

Tim Wilson of BorisFX, at 2-pop: Glow Video, Glow. “A recent 2-pop post asked about methods for applying glowing highlights to video, and I offered a quick reply….” He expands his answer in this article. Nice effects.

Here are some early thoughts: a computer that can do these things out of the box:

• capture, edit, and export digital video ready for tape, web, DVD, or CD
  
• edit digital audio with the same export capabilities
  
• store up to 4.7 gigabyte of this on a disc that will play in DVD-equipped computers or in TV set-top players
  
• includes a complete suite of apps: word processing, presentations, database, spreadsheet, all interchangeable with Microsoft office apps and exportable as PDFs

The cost: $1749, the current Education Store price. That is a huge amount of functionality for education. For educators working with video, whether elementary, secondary, or higher education the capabilities, quality, and stability just keep getting better from this company.

You can do all this on a PC running Windows. All of it. I just don’t think you can do it as soon as you open the box for the same price. If so, great, and tell me how, because I love seeing these companies compete and make these machines better and faster and smaller and easier. I really don’t know what a comparable PC would cost. If you have a comparison, I would love to see it.

A concern, however: how durable is the stalk for the screen? What if some aggressive 4th grader just hits it with his book bag?

Rafe Colburn: “The price difference between an iMac and a consumer model Gateway PC seems less extreme when you realize that it comes with some killer applications that you just can’t get for your PC…. Certainly they’re making me with I’d opted for an iBook instead of the Toshiba laptop I bought….”

I missed it when they first posted it: 2-pop: So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish. Nice overview of the state of pro video, and a nice look ahead to an uncertain and potentially wild future, when all the kids with iMovie and a cheap DV camcorder take to the professional ranks. I definitely want to be around to see that.

Editing Techniques with Final Cut Pro reviewed by… Ken Stone. Looking over this review, and the basics of editing that it discusses, reminded me of how powerful it is. Kuleshov did some of the best-known deliberate studies of it. The story is that he took a film clip of  a well-known actor looking off-camera and intercut it with three different clips and showed the different sequences to three different audiences. The same actor, the same shot, but alternating with a dead child, a bowl of soup, a woman’s face. The audiences each took his expression to relate to the shot that followed: mourning the child, hunger for the soup, desire for the woman. They added those meanings, which were implied by the juxtaposition of the shots. Editing.

Anyone who watches television or films is at least an unconscious student of editing. When we watch TV, we’re trying to tie together the flow of images and sounds into a whole, a story from which we can make sense. Viewing TV from an early age conditions viewers to understand this visual language. What does it mean when in a movie, after a conversation, a scene fades to black? What if it faded up to a continuation of the same conversation? It would feel, at best, like an “art film,” at worst like a mistake that made little sense.

This and other editing conventions (the reverse-angle during a conversation, the point-of-view shot, etc) can be considered a kind of grammar, a visual language with its own syntax, implications, ambiguities, and so on. Learning editing is similar to learning any new language: practice, and making mistakes, is an important part of understanding.