DV for Teachers

Charles Wiltgen: “P2P streaming is important because the bandwidth burden is shared among the broadcaster and its viewers, and so it makes streaming broadcasts possible where it would’ve otherwise been cost-prohibitive.” This means your QuickTime streaming server, and your network, won’t need huge amounts of bandwidth to reach a really wide audience. Great idea – unless and until the studios try to control this form of distribution.

To beat the familiar drum: distribution is the key, and they want to take it away even from legitimate distributors of video and audio “content.” I made an audio recording last week of the Georgia State Test for English Proficiency on our new ProTools workstation. I took it to my Windows XP desktop in the office to make some copies while I did other things – email, etc. The CD would play, but I couldn’t easily copy it – the 143 MB audio file only appeared on the XP desktop as a 1 KB pointer. I didn’t have time then to toubleshoot, but I have no doubt that Microsoft, and the RIAA’s efforts to criminalize their customers (also known as “pirates”), deliberately made it difficult for producers like me to duplicate and distribute recordings we make ourselves. Insane.

Mac Design Online has posted a nice tutorial for creating text screens in your video with Final Cut. Most educational videos have portions that include a presentation-like screen with bullet points. Philip Hedges leads you through a how-to that really shows how much you can do, all within FCP.——-

In Cut to the Chase, Sheigh Crabtree reports that Walter Murch is editing Anthony Minghella’s adaptation of Charles Frazier’s (darned fine) novel, Cold Mountain, with Final Cut Pro. Murch was an Oscar winner for editing The English Patient, and worked with Francis Ford Coppola on many of his best films, including credit for “sound montage” for The Conversation and for Apocalypse Now. Terry Gross has an engaging interview with Murch (RealPlayer required; avoid the innumerable sales pitches and get the free version by scrolling down on this page).

Murch knows the medium: check out this series of articles about and by him and his book, In the Blink of an Eye. It’s a tremendous coup for Apple that Murch is the first to use Final Cut Pro for a major studio feature.——-

The hinge on my PowerBook just busted. Futz. Thank goodness for Mike Bombich’s Carbon Copy Cloner, which will allow me to make exact clones of my drive partitions before I send the machine out for AppleCare’s gentle ministrations. So . . . we’ll see when I can next update this page. Soon, I hope, but if not, enjoy your holiday.

Apple has updated KnowledgeBase article 58636: Final Cut Pro: What Kind of Hard Drive Should I Buy? Whether you use Final Cut Pro or another system on another platform, it’s a nice digest of information on the demands video places on a computer and the capabilities of different types of drives. Biggest point: don’t always rely on external FireWire drives for capture – they may not be able to keep up. I have never had a problem, even with a bus-powered external drive capturing from a daisy-chained DV camera on my PowerBook, but YMMV.

Ken Stone posts a look at Digital Anarchy’s Psunami for aquatic effects for titles and other animations, and at Synthetic Aperture’s Color Finesse. These are esoteric tools, but they represent the continuation of a trend, along with Film Gimp and PC-based NLEs overall: the plummeting prices of high-quality tools previously available only within the filmmaking and broadcast industry.

Special effects, sound editing, complex effects and animations, all the tools are now within the budget of any serious educational institution. The marketplace has put these tools within our reach, and our programs have to give the students the skills – aesthetic as well as technical – to create the next generation of media that will entertain, inform, and shape us.

Part of this education means continued close attention to the “stories” presented by mainstream media. The Trent Lott debacle is a particular case in point, one that I hope will attract study from scholars: how and why did small media outlets – weblogs, and Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo was apparently out front on this - give this story its inital push, and not the the major papers, broadcast networks, or wire services? I have my theories about the value journalists place on “access” and the risk a story critical of such a leader would have posed to it; there’s also the pack mentality of waiting for someone else to raise the issue so everyone else can safely follow. In any event, this story is a watershed in the evolution of web journalism. DV for Teachers is like a tiny trade journal, trying to keep up with issues that effect the uses and creation of multimedia in education. Thanks for reading.

Charles at PlaybackTime notes the availability of Film Gimp for Mac OS X “becoming an essential tool of the special effects industry.” He has links to the home page for downloads, its history, and an interview with the release manager. He also notes that it’s “not available for Windows.” Hm.

Creative Mac has an important tip for Final Cut users, especially if you edit for broadcast. The app’s indicators for title safe areas are not precisely correct. Stephen Schleicher’s tips are worthwhile.

There’s also Mac OS X Troubleshooting Basics and Part 3 of a series on customizing iDVD themes.

I sat down yesterday with the ProTools Tutorial posted by Loyola Marymount’s Professor Pardee. Learned enough to record a mini-lecture and a conversation for a test the university will give to non-native speakers of English attending Georgia State. Lots of work. What do you do with your “session” when you’re finished? You don’t export it, you don’t “save as,” you “bounce to disk.” Who knew?

Remy Martin responds to “Windows Video Editing Pulls Ahead of the Mac”, which compares Windows Movie Maker and iMovie. Martin offers some different perspectives on the article, but it made me realize how much improved the options are on the Windows side. Read both articles, and then read The New York Times’ “Video Editing at Your Computer.” I have XP, and Windows Movie Maker, on my office desktop. I’ll have to give it a serious look.

Many updates at the essential Little QuickTime Page.

Check out Charles Wiltgens’ latest at PlaybackTime, particularly his comments on MPEG-4 Licensing and his later comments on the continuing responses by the music industry to peer-to-peer file sharing (Napster et al).

Hummph. Just found out that NECC didn’t accept my workshop proposal. C’est la vie. Makes for a less intense summer in 2003, I suppose.——-

Untested by me, but a tall claim: how about a free, open-source video editor made with this goal: ” . . . to include all the features of QuickTime Pro and iMovie in one free software.” Some enterprising French developers created this – called iVideo – and posted it at SourceForge. Found via Macintouch. I just tried it; it wouldn’t recognized any video file without the ”.mov” extension, and once the file was imported, I couldn’t figure out how to get it to play in the Viewer or to appear in the /”Sequenceur” timeline window. It is incomplete; they should call it a beta; c’est la vie.

Also from Macintouch: Simple Video Splicer (beta), which allows video and audio editing (/”splicing”) of QuickTime and MPEG files. It’s aptly named: it’s simple; its beta, with some interface glitches (the “Help” button in the middle of a QT movie screen, in one case); and it splices video clips together. I tried it with some movei trailers I had on my system; not bad; really good for beta-ware.——-