DV for Teachers

Atomic Learning is going mad – their Halloween Madness
makes all their online tutorials free until November 3rd. Mostly Mac
applications, but also Windows-only apps  Publisher, eg and duo-platform
apps such as Photoshop, Powerpoint, Inspiration, Flash, KidPix, FileMaker
Pro, and many others. I downloaded the Final Cut Pro movies. Not as pretty
as Steve’s at Ripple Training,
or the guys he used to work with at dvcreators.net,
but good information.

If you work in Education with Macs, I doubt you’re fully pleased with the
company’s prices and support. There are happy customers, of course, but they’re
not likely to post pointed, informed complaints like this one from Steve Wood at MathDittos. He followed it up today with reader comments; worth reading, and pondering, and worth
telling your Apple Education rep about, in no uncertain terms.
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I’ve been emailing myself links for a week to post – more to come tomorrow. But for now, if you’re a K-12 classroom teacher, click here to get your free copy of Mac OS X 10.2 “Jaguar.” Yow, good deal.

It’s probably too little for Steve Wood, who seems to speak from sad experience. Read his Straight Talk About the Education Market for a bitter point of view of the Mac place in education today. I work in a college, teaching multimedia skills – very basic ones – to teachers and eduction students. i don’t know how widely his experience is shared, but too much of what he says seems true from my vantage, even as Apple is creating the best, most timely products in its existence. We all seem to have the curse: that we live in “interesting times.”

Here’s the update: discreet [yes, small ‘d’] is shipping cleaner 6 [yes, small ‘c’] for Mac OS X. THE tool for compression to web, CD or multimedia. Charles at Playbacktime.com says that under OS X it doesn’t compress to WM 9 or Real, but the info I see on their site doesn’t say so… hmmm. [Can’t link directly to Charles’ comment – permalinks don’t seem to work yet on his new blog. It is still officially beta, so I sent him a bug report. I’d have permalinks here but I too often forget to do it. Sorry.] permalink to this item

Lots of good tips and tutorials at Digital Media Net:

• Steady Tracker Xtreme Reviewed
  
• Lighting 101—Part 4: The Background Light [how did I miss parts 1,2 & 3?]
  
• Editing From Another Planet: Alienware Invades DV
  
• Weekly Download: Custom Shapes for Photoshop 7
  
• Behind the Scenes: Editing The Man Who Knew for PBS’s Frontline

I mentioned old faves: the Little QuickTime Page is back, and has a boatload of links to follow if you do QuickTime authoring.

I found PlaybackTime.com through a link at Macintouch, and it turned out to be Charles Wiltgen, with whom I made email acquaintance when he worked for Terran Interactive when they owned Media Cleaner, which is now cleaner (without a capital c) and owned by discreet (without a capital d). [got all that?] PlaybackTime.com is a blog tracking developments in all platforms and formats of digital media.

It’s wacko busy here in the ITC. Lots of mid-term project angst in the air – and corrupted floppies ruining weeks of work, people uploading their first web pages, “Does Excel run on these machines?”, “The system won’t let me log in,” and people not showing up for their videoconferencing appointments. We love technology in Education!!!——-

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Welcome to my day off – but I couldn’t pass this one up:
MPEG zooms in on new video codec – Tech News – CNET.com: “An international standards team is close to approving a new compression format for digital video, promising improvements as well as a few uncertainties for emerging multimedia technology.” Another glimpse of potential futures for anyone who makes and distributes video – including educators, their students, and independents. Via Adam Curry.
Here’s some more:
The AppleScript Sourcebook – AppleScript 1.9: “This report, like all previous reports, is based on information obtained from various sources, including official Apple publications and several AppleScript and Mac OS X mailing lists and news groups, as well as my own investigations on my own computers.” Via Brent Simmons; I’m learning more and more about what AppleScript can do, and this looks to be a particularly good resource. Very methodical and well explained.
Giles Bateman points to a Red Herring editorial – Smash the entertainment empire: ... “rather than fight the likes of Disney and News Corporation on Capitol Hill, technology companies ought to treat them as business threats—defeat them with innovative technologies that will attract the talent necessary to produce compelling content.”——-

Creative Mac Tutorials for Final Cut Pro: “Here are a few more Color Correction workflow tips that might help out when you are polishing your masterpiece.” This is a link to a frame within their larger site; scroll down to see the previous eight FCP tips.

An oddly named story at IDG.net, Windows Media 9 steals MPEG-4’s thunder, covers aspects of the ongoing competition/shakedown in streaming media platforms, codecs, and their various places in the market and the affect of different licensing schemes.

MIT OpenCourseWare: “MIT and the OpenCourseWare team are excited to share with you a first sampling of course materials from MIT’s Faculty. We invite educators around the world to draw upon the materials for their own curricula, and we encourage all learners to use the materials for self-study.” Excellent.

Here’s my ”>NECC proposal for a two-day Final Cut Pro workshop.

I’m working on learning more about Cascading Style Sheets, and this looks like a good resource.

A good preview of the issues involved in the copyright case argued yesterday in the Supreme Court. Here’s Yale lawmeme coverage from the argument itself.

Ken Stone reviews Adobe Photoshop Elements 2 for use with Final Cut Pro, and finds it a great value. Why buy the humongous beast that is full Photoshop – for $600, mind you – when the $99 version will do all you need? Educators, take note!

John Welch of workingmac.com offers a two day spank of Apple for insufficient support of AppleScript – Part I, Part II. He especially takes them to task for not supporting AppleScript in Final Cut Pro and iDVD. He’s got a good point, especially as Media100, a direct competitor to Final Cut, offers scriptability on the Mac.

Jesse Shanks, a veteran AppleScripter, responds with some good points, although he doesn’t address Welch’s major criticism: that Apple’s own flagship video and DVD apps are not scriptable for increased productivity.

Shanks has a nice AppleScript DVD still capture utility: “DVD Capture is a helper application for the Apple DVD Player. Works on MacOS 10.2 or better only. It enables the user to take screen captures of the DVD Player Viewer in window and full screen mode. The captures can be saved to a file or placed on the clipboard. Now updated to version 1.5 with remembered settings, Help and slider to control speed of capture delay.” Good for teachers of film!——-

Updates are on hold while I finish my workshop proposal for NECC 2003 in Seattle.——-

Nick Meyers at LAFCPUG – Fun with Batch Exporting: “Call me old fashioned, I like Batch Export. It doesn’t have too many Bells and Whistles, like Media Manager, and it doesn’t promise the world. But it’s got a kind of reliable functionality, and it does work.”

Apple, Sorenson settle lawsuits. From Macnn.

2-pop, now little more than a page of industry press releases with message-board hosting, has one press release I find interesting:

Ondaatje, Murch Collaborate for ‘Conversations on Editing’ The book “The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film” written by Michael Ondaatje has just been released.

Ondaatje and Murch met during the production of Anthony Mingella’s adaptation of The English Patient, and carried on a series of interviews over the years that comprise this book. After hearing Murch discuss this film, the novel, and editing on Fresh Air, I will read this book.——-