DV for Teachers

TidBITS: Creating an iMovie Slide Show
Nice, straightforward explanation of something I have many requests for. Adam Engst and the staff of TidBITS do a great job. April 25 2002——-

Restoring a Corrupt FCP Project. Oh… I can hear the moans of relief now; this guy may get lots of unsolicited fan mail. I haven’t got a corrupted project to test it on, but I will keep a copy of this on my hard drive, you can believe that.

I’m going to upgrade the usability of this site by posting pages of permanent lists of links on different subjects, and if I get really ambitious, cross-listing them. One of the limitations of this weblog software is the difficulty of finding earlier posts by subject. If and when I can host this myself on a GUS Frontier server, I can install a search engine, but in the meantime I hope this makes things easier.——-

TidBITS: Creating an iMovie Slide Show
Nice, straightforward explanation of something I have many requests for. Adam Engst and the staff of TidBITS do a great job.

Adam Wilt: More Power to You:
“Lighting is a tool, and as with all tools, it obeys the laws of physics. But understanding the physics of lighting is only a tool to help you use the tool-a metatool, if you will. What to do with the tool, though-how to use lighting to best bring out the tonalities, textures, and depth of your subjects-is the really interesting bit. I hope these recent columns have helped you grok the tech so you can spend less time thinking about how and more time thinking about why you’re using lights the way you do.”

Transom Tools:
“ProTools Free: That’s right. We have not one, but two series to help you get going with Digidesign’s ProTools Free software, which unavoidably contain useful tips for all DAWs.” I looked more closely at yesterday’s link to the Transom and found this page. Solid information from professionals for making broadcast-quality audio with free tools and techniques. Hard to beat.

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The usual good and useful links from The Little QuickTime Page, including useful filters for iMovie, tools for converting video to Flash and an MPEG2 to QuickTime converter. Go look.

Streamingmedia.com – A Guide to Great Web Video: Preprocessing Video
“Delivering good quality video almost invariably requires preprocessing of source video. Contributor Barb Roeder lays the groundwork in discussing some of the most important preprocessing filters.” Valuable information on professional quality video compression.

Extensively quoted from Mary Lu:

The nutshell: The Transom is the brainchild of a group of savvy people including Bill McKibben and Jay Allison, winner of[unknown entity]the Peabody Award and[unknown entity]the Murrow Award in Broadcasting in 1996. Transom is connected to the non-profit group Atlantic Public Media, who administers the Transom.org site and WCAI & WNAN, the new NPR service for Cape Cod, Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket, which is managed by WGBH-Boston. The prime directive for The Transom is to provide a space for experimenting and fostering new work and productions in radio/webcasting and some community. The wonderful thing about Transom—Transom openly solicits new work and productions from anyone. Yes ANYONE.

Here’s what they are looking for…

“We’re looking for great radio—things that are less heard, different angles, new voices, new ways of telling, and any other good pieces that haven’t found another way onto public radio. Editors evaluate material more by what it does than what it is. Some questions they’ll consider:

On the air, would it keep you by your radio until it’s over?
Is the maker someone of talent who should be encouraged?
Does it push at the boundary of conventional radio in an exciting way?
Will it provoke fruitful discussion online?

Submissions can be stories, essays, home recordings, sound portraits, interviews, found sound, non-fiction pieces, audio art, whatever, as long as it’s good listening. Material may be submitted by anyone, anywhere—by citizens with stories to tell, by radio producers trying new styles, by writers and artists wanting to experiment with radio. As long as it hasn’t already aired nationally, we’ll consider it. ”

Go to Mary’s site, read more, and then go to the Transom and find out what you can contribute. It ain’t exactly video, but the opportunities for teachers and students and other users of any form of mass communication can benefit from supporting, listening to and contributing to this effort.——-

What do you think about this?
Austin American-Statesman: “UT want Apple in students’ laps”: “Beginning this fall, the University of Texas will require students entering its teacher preparation programs to have laptops, and if they can’t get the right machine, they’ll have to buy it from Apple Computer Corp.” Lots of places require computers, but this seems to be the first in a College of Education, and they require Apple to boot. They don’t say what the required software is, though.

HA! I found an answer to the crawling Cleaner problem: I had been deleting and adding files to the same batch file. According to the fine person Jeff Handy at Creative Cow’s Cleaner discussion forum:

Be sure to always start with a new batch before starting a compression session. :) Then, if you don’t have anything in your trash bin, put something there and empty the trash. ...

Go visit Ken Stone’s page. Many new updates, worth your time and bandwidth.

Compressing batches of files with the Sorenson codec goes well for the first file, but slows glacially for the second – an hour maybe for the first, 10 hours for the second similar file. Crazy making and looking for an answer.

iDisk = iRisk. Macintouch posted discussions on file corruptions during transfers to iDisks and other network drives under OS X 10.1.3 earlier this month. Well, the bug seems to have bitten me. I transferred a group of files to an iDisk and a 1+ MB PowerPoint file – both the copy and original on my local drive – got corrupted during the transfer. A first look at the file with BB Edit Lite shows a lot of the recent revisions, so I don’t think all is lost, but I learned a lesson: always copy from a copy, put my original on a CD ASAP, and do not trust online storage. Think FTP, FTP, FTP, FTP, FTP, FTP, FTP, FTP, FTP, FTP. A new mantra.——-

Heather Green at BusinessWeek: “For some reason, the myth continues that broadband finally makes it fun to watch movies on your PC. As anyone with a T1 line can tell you, that’s just not true. Only Hollywood seems to believe the ultimate use for a computer is to watch videos.” More on the CBDTPA. It’s been kicked around, but it may not be dead yet. Help put a stake through its heart.

Quick updates today; more thorough tomorrow.

NAB Convention Boon for Apple, Bust for MPEG-4. Thanks to Heng-Cheong Leong’s myapplemenu.

Giles Bateman’s giles.hn.org:81 had great pointers last week:

New MPEG-2 encoder.

digitallyOBSESSED Software has a tool, QT HTML, that generates proper EMBED and OBJECT code for a movie. It’s an AppleScript Studio application (i.e. Mac-only). [Giles found the link at The Little QuickTime Page. No surprise there.]

My favorite link for some time, again thanks to Giles: “Sunlight, Camera, Action! Filmmaker makes documentary using solar power.” With an iBook, an external 120 GB Firewire drive, Final Cut Pro, and some solar cells, he’s editing a feature length documentary. In his tent.

Yes, they do, and a deadline has my attention today. Back with NAB news soon.——-

The Little QuickTime Page has a new crop of updates, including links to tips for “Windows users wanting to play back QuickTime movies in PowerPoint” and “the Blue Abuse Developer page, which has interviews with folks in the education world that are using QuickTime in interesting ways.” Right up our alley.
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HELP SQUASH THE CDBTPA.

The NAB conference in Las Vegas goes on, and the deluge of product announcements continues. The NAB Daily News page keeps you abreast of the biggest announcements; Macintouch has a good record of yesterday’s announcements related to the Mac. Lots of companies will announce lots of stuff amid lots of hype. That’s what NAB is for, and that’s a cornerstone of television anyway, noisy hype hyping hyped noise. But the hype and noise provide jobs, occasionally some worthwhile news reporting and valuable entertainment, and even something of artistic value once in a while. So as the announcements are announced, I’ll try to bring some of the relevant ones in focus here.——-