DV for Teachers

Will at Weblogg-Ed is thinking hard about implementing weblogs in his school in a big way. He’s got lots of help, but schools and systems like his are not the norm.

Contrast: A former GSU professor, highly skilled in using technology in her science education curriculum, visited us today. We heard about the College of Education faculty at her new university, about their skills and expectations, and about how much the faculty leaves up to the secretaries. She asked a colleague for a copy of a syllabus, and was told, “Well, the secretary isn’t here yet.” The instructor didn’t have a copy of her own syllabus on her own PC. Handouts to students are copies of copies of copies, difficult to read and so smeared that OCR software can’t do anything with it. “You’d spend two and a half hours retyping that just to hand out to students?”, she was asked. Well, duh!

The task of implementing technology successfully, to impart skills and enhance learning, remains an uphill struggle in so much of the country. Classroom teachers feel the pressure to teach to the test, and learning and teaching new technology skills becomes yet another administrative burden to many of them. On the college level, education students are mandated to graduate with specific technology proficiency levels, and some of their instructors aren’t up to speed on them either.

Some of these professors see this as a burden, and often we teach their students technology skills in special single-class workshops, and these professors don’t stay to learn the technology themselves. Further, the professors sometimes don’t integrate the requisite technology into the class sufficiently, so it’s just a one-shot, enough to put something in the portfolio but insufficient for the students to really learn the skill enough to use it as a tool. It’s another form of teaching to the test.

This is the slower going part of the process. The energetic early adopters are already on their way, and we are now working with those who don’t immediately see the benefit and those to whom the technology is more intimidating. Our teaching strategies have to slow down, take account of the different learning styles of adults, and keep plugging away, while keeping up with the ever-changing progress of the technology we’re teaching.

I love my job. Not just in spite of all this, but because of all this. We’re all part of a huge experiment; we’re making it up as we go along, and in doing so, we’re making history. I wouldn’t be anywhere else.——-

Ken Stone posts an excerpt from Tom Wolsky’s latest book on Final Cut Pro, about creating titles in Photoshop for import into video. I haven’t read the book, but the how-to is very informative.

Charlie White reviews the new Canopus ProCoder, praising its interface and features, many of which he says aren’t available in discreet’s cleaner.

PCTechGuide is an extensive U.K.-based site covering the technical side of computing. They have a good overview of the techie side of DV as well.——-

Dave Winer on a proposed bill in Congress that would sanction any copyright holder’s attempts to hack your computer if they think you might have illegal copies of copyrighted material on your hard drive. This is important. If you teach video in any capacity, you’re teaching a kind of literacy that depends on high-tech tools that face Big-Brother-like control… but not at the behest of some totalitarian government. This is done for the sake of an industry based on an outdated distribution model, an industry that has apparently bought and paid for government representation out of all proportion. They have the bucks and good lawyers. Fight them, for your sake, and your students’ sake. Do it now. *

I’ve updated the SIGGRAPH Followup for folks who attended our course. *

Ben Waggoner has posted PDFs of some of his articles about video compression (thanks to Judy and Robert). Make sure to see Ben’s recent article at DV.com about compressing his recently released tutorial CD on discreet’s cleaner 5. (You’ll have to log in to read it, though.) *

I’m looking for a host for a plain dvforteachers.com site. Userland has hosted this site for free at manilasites.com since its inception, but it’s time for me to pay my way. Can anyone tell me anything about fourbucks.net? I found them – via MacEdition – while reading about the dot-mac controversy. Fourbucks.net seems really inexpensive and they promise quality on a clean, pop-up free site. Too good to be true? Others here have recommended Earthlink, but something doesn’t feel right there; I’ve heard wierd things I can’t repeat, but I’d need some convincing. *——-

It was really great – and I had to leave early. Please find out more about SIGGRAPH, if you have anything at all to do with graphics, multimedia, computer games, video, Photoshop… in all, anything to do with computers that’s more than just straight text. You and your students will find something wonderful.——-

5:15 p.m.: Again in the Collaboration area, after watching some great clips in the Animation Theater. Just discovered Teddy, a free 3D modelling application that’s actually a Java applet that runs in a browser. Its creator, Takeo Igarashi of the University of Tokyo, is a past keynoter of SIGGRAPH and just finished a demo of this, which I missed, but I was a moment ago surrounded by enthusiastic animators playing with it. Follow the link, play the tutorial clip, and go to town with it.

3:45 p.m.: In the Collaboration area of the Art Studio here, and the tools and ideas are flowing around and banging off of each other at high velocity. I’ve seen interactive projections that respond one to light, the other to shadow, and while I was there, someone asked the artist “What can you do with it?” The answer is words to this effect: “It’s art. I already did something with it.” I saw photo-realistic still life images in extreme high definition, made with Maya animation software. I spoke with an artist who works mapping the movements of people around the city with GPS tracking in real time, making traced images of their movements over the course of the conference days, printing them on transparencies, and layering them between layers of 1/2-inch lucite to create a 3D map. I just swapped cards with Patricia Clark, a videographer and video artist from Arizona State. She’s got a great situation: she’s a media artist and co-manager of a media lab at her university. “Nice work if you can get it, and if you get it, won’t you tell me how….”

There is beauty and strangeness here, as well as rank commercialism (I have been as greedy for the exhibit-hall swag as anyone) and the hot smelly breath of salespeople hoping to close sales. I like this, and I’m coming back.

8:00 a.m.: These are some of the folks I’ve met at SIGGRAPH:

Wes Lane, a show specialist with Audio Visual Solutions, the group doing the AV support for much of the show, helped me out in Speaker Prep when I hadn’t even registered yet. He’s based in Atlanta, too.

At the course: Darlene Wolfe, a middle school science teacher and science education consultant who told me about Applied Magic, a black box video editor; she referred me to Aletha Walther.

Steven Bowie of the International Academy of Design and Technology, who had kind words of appreciation for our course.

Richard Salemi who had some interesting challenges with iMovie – audio drifting and losing synch on longish projects, but only if they apply color correction... hmmm.

Michael Miller, with NCSA, a former colleague of Barbara Helfer’s at Ohio State.

Lisa Valdez of the University of Minnesota appreciated the course, and particularly had questions for Dan our audio expert.

At the reception Monday night (top notch beef brisket, by the way): Kathy Barshatzky, who taught a course on SVG, SMIL, and XML, and who kindly gave me her URL where she promises to post her latest course notes (at a cool domain: javakathy.com. I like it.).
Michelle Kasprzak of the Canadian Film Centre in Toronto, who is part of a group working on open source hardware and software for artists (and sporting a button about the size of a nickel saying STEAL CONTENT. I like her too.

I really appreciated meeting John Fujii. He’s a past SIGGRAPH conference chair and a software engineer for Hewlett Packard. We talked about passion, energy, the cycle of creativity, the difference between tolerance and acceptance, the importance of knowing ourselves so we can more fully understand others, and a key to most of that: trust.——-

The presentation out of the way, I’m now a regular attendee of this big show. I look forward to the exhibit floor tomorrow and the chance for cool swag. Meantime, Ellen and I are going in about 30 minutes to hear a paper, the program blurb for which reads: “What Do Computers Eat? Teaching Beginners to Think Critically About Technology and Art – New curriculum for an introductory course in art and technology in which students compare the software industry with fast food to investigate patterns of consumption in US culture.” It’s presented by Tiffany Holmes of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.——-

Follow links to NECC workshop here.——-

Here are the links for downloading additional information from the SIGGRAPH Course.

Low-cost PC-based DV editing apps reviewed at PC Magazine.

This is the Creativepro.com tutorial on making a DVD demo reel:
Part I
Part II
Part III.

Here’s a FAQ on MPEG-2 from the Berkeley Multimedia Research Center:
http://bmrc.berkeley.edu/research/mpeg/mpeg2faq.html

MPEG-4 Licensing terms finalized Monday July 15: http://news.com.com/2100-1023-944051.html

Whether you’re exporting your demo to DVD or VHS, these precautions apply:
NTSC Limitations [unknown entity] Resolution, Color, Resolution

• Export animations with high-resolution uncompressed codec: QuickTime Animation compressor with QuickTime Pro, e.g.
  
• Strictly 720×480, 72 dpi
  
• TV [unknown entity]safe areas[unknown entity] for picture and title
  
• Avoid lines less than one pixel in width
  
• Color
  
• Video monitors have most limited color palette
  
• Reds, magenta bleed and flicker on TV
  
• In video, White is approx 75-80% of white on RGB computer monitor
  
• Use Photoshop or similar NTSC-safe color filter
  
• Desaturate colors as needed to avoid artifacts
  
• Preview on NTSC monitor when possible

——-

We’ve begun our presentation; Barb is speaking now about the different specs and formats of digital video, from uncompressed to DV.

Dan’s talking about audio, and I’ll talk about compression and codecs.

It went well – folks seemed to like it. No one left, at least. *——-

Here’s a nice tip for giving a shallow depth-of-field look to a too-sharp digital picture. Nice. *

QT 6 not certified FCP Compatible
Just read at Macintouch that some users are having success, others problems, with QuickTime 6 and Final Cut Pro 3. Apple hasn’t certified it yet, so YMMV. *

Just got on the wireless network in the Gonzalez Convention Center. Trying to get access to the room where we teach our course on Sunday. I’m here to get some additional online resources for the course, including some of the latest news regarding the MPEG-4 licensing agreement, as well as Apple’s new QuickTime 6 (some reasons why it’s important), and their open source Darwin version of the new Streaming Server, for Mac OS X, Red Hat Linux, Solaris 8, and Windows NT Server/Windows 2000 Server.

Why QuickTime? It’s the acknowledged architecture for multimedia creation, runs on Mac and Windows, can read and edit most image and video formats (from little internet GIFs to uncompressed SD video), it’s cheap, and for teachers, what else do you need to know? *

More from San Antonio and SIGGRAPH to come.——-