DV for Teachers

Many many thanks to Sam Devore and Daniel Berlinger, who helped me get our Frontier server running again. Special thanks to Sam, who offered to have me call him for help. Sam hosts Manila sites for education – if you’re interested, check his site, Teachesme.com.

Next week, fixing Pictures and Gems on our server.

Andrew, who teaches film (oops that’s Film) at Gainesville College, is checking the ITC and my weblog. He’s absolutely fascinated.

A video(ish) tip for today: Derrick Story’s easy tips for adding voiceovers to quick slide shows, videos, and screenshot animations.

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Frontier fixing is coming along. Hoping to rescue the great student blogs from the kids at J. H. House Elementary in Rockdale County.

Giles Bateman linked Sunday to these cool things:

• a U of Virginia student’s $14 galvanized pipe Steadicam-like device and
  
• a utility for using your DV camcorder or tape deck to backup and restore data. I haven’t tested it, but it’s a great idea.

Giles also has the laugh-out-loud line of the day in his post linking to the new Matrix Reloaded movie trailer that showed during that football game last Sunday.

Informative article in our independent weekly paper – Creative Loafing – about opportunities for showing and viewing independent/student work around Atlanta.

Digitally Obsessed has AppleScripts for easy creation of HTML for embedding QuickTime movies in your web pages, batch processing, and lots for scripting the Apple DVD player. [via Judy and Robert at The Little QuickTime Page, who are back on a regular update schedule themselves.]

Charles Wiltgen on upcoming specifications for digital rights managemen under MPEG-4 and for next-generation DVDs.

David Morgenstern at creativepro.com on new FireWire and USB 2.0 hardware and software and some of the ways it can affect workflow and date storage strategies. He also cites Noren Product’s gCab for quieting noisy Mac workstations (we have a “wind tunnel” Mac for an audio workstation that makes wa-a-a-y too much noise; I think Noren will hear from us.——-

I’ve got problems with my Frontier/Manila server. The following is a message I sent to some frontier-using folk who might be able to help; if you can help, please leave word in the discussion group here or email me at tmerritt at gsu.edu. Many thanks.

All my Manila sites give the “attempted to read from a free block” message. Lawrence Lee has offered some help [see this thread], but I had to tend to other things since I last wrote him. Now the pressure is on to get things back, and PDQ.

His last message (Jan 15) on the thread says:——————————
How large is the manilaWebsites.root? Do you know which tables are corrupted? The first thing to do is quit Frontier and make a backup of manilaWebsites.root in its current state. Then use table.jettison to get rid of the problem tables and if possible do a Save a Copy on the database. If you can open the manilaWebsites.root in the Frontier application, you can use the Export command on a table and it will usually throw an error dialog with the specific address of the corrupted object so you don’t have to table.jettison the entire site. In a Quick Script, you can enter the address of a table. eg. table.jettison (@bad.table) If this doesn’t work, then resort to ODBExtractor. http://www.mose.com/flip/frontier/odb_extractor.html

Lawrence
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I replied just this morning:
Lawrence, manilaWebsites.root is only 10 MB or so – not very big. I don’t know which tables are corrupted. I copied/backed up as you said to, but I don’t know how to find which tables are corrupted. I’ve opened manilaWebsites.root in Frontier and exported a number of tables and no errors came up. Should I try table.jettison on copies of some of the sites? I’m really at sea here, and even though we’re “just testing” at this stage, some folks are really getting insistent that this work. I’m already getting questions like “wouldn’t this work better on a Windows server?” and I don’t know if they’re right or not.
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If you could shed any light, I’d deeply appreciate it.——-

Trying to shoot some trouble with our Frontier installation. Wish me good hunting and squashing of them bugs. And make sure you set things to be backed up. I may have been the biggest bug in this problem. Admin, backup thyself.

Also, new desktop Macs today!——-

What’s to do in SF? We’re planning a family trip to the west coast this summer, spending few days in San Francisco. Four of us: Ellen and me and our two teenage boys, 13 (by then) and 15. What’s to do for a crew like that in the city? Any suggestions that go a little beyond the usual Fisherman’s Wharf tourist recommendations would be very much appreciated.

MacNN links to loud By Design’s Stop-Motion-Studio, a $39.95 app for making stop motion films with a Firewire-connected DV camera. Mac OS 9 and OS X only.

MaccNN also notes the beginning of School Night at the Apple Store, Apple’s invitation to showcase school and student use of Apple technology and offer discounts to schools, teachers, and parents. The Atlanta Apple Store’s first such event is Wednesday at 6:30. I’ll go if I can . . . .

Final MacNN link for now: Sorenson’s release of new video compression applications. Educational pricing here.

New at Ken Stone: a look at keyframing capabilities in the new Final Cut Express and a review of CHV Electronics’ Bezier Garbage Matte: ” . . .guaranteed to provide just the right amount of points to work with for even the most demanding editor. Providing 5, 10, 12, 20 and 40 point mattes, the FCP editor is no longer stuck with the frequently inadequate
4 and 8 point maps which come included in FCP.”

O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter links to Videomaker’s Best Products of the Year Awards. They really seem to look for the most bang for buck rather than simply best of the best. Good information.

Macintouch has added to their Digitizing Video report. Since schools always have a variety of non-standard tools and older equipment around, there’s a lot of real-world information here on work-arounds and expectations.——-

Good Macintouch thread on low-cost tools for digitizing analog video into OS X. I have a day off, but after my recent stretches of no posts, I want to stay in the habit.——-

My office desktop, a nice 2.5 GHz Dell with a GB of ram and enough disk space to qualify for re-zoning, runs Windows XP. Eudora 5.1.1.6 stopped opening my email the day before yesterday. I was out taking care of a bronchitis-suffering 7th grader who lives in my house and using WinVNC as a server and VNCThing to tunnel in and keep up with things. Somewhere in there, Eudora quit opening the messages. They download, and I can get to them with Notepad, but feh. (So I need to fix it; first step is uninstall and reinstall. I love troubleshooting on Windows. Double feh.) Eudora on Mac OS X is an ugly mess, and doesn’t support many of the contextual/right-click menu options most apps use, but it does save everything in straight text files, so it’s easy to search and I can use any text editor if I need to.

So Eudora burped on my XP machine: maybe another reason to stop using it, move it all to the PowerBook, and get religious about backing up (I’ve been much better than I used to be, and before getting bitten!). I may switch email clients too – GNUMail looks interesting, and there are many many to choose from at the Mac Orchard. (Looking for the Mac Orchard link, Google turned up a Mac Resources page at Ilene’s Machine - a quaint but useful-looking page on many aspects of the Mac.)

In the meantime, Craig Dominey has a nice blog – he’s an Atlanta-based Flashmaster, and brother to a guy I knew a little when I worked at IMAGE.

Charles at PlaybackTime links here to an edited version of last year’s State of the Union. Shows the power of editing – now what did he say? #——-

For two years, DV for Teachers has reflected my efforts to keep up with issues and technologies that affect educators who use, make, or teach moving images. I’ve also used this site to explore how a weblog can serve as a tool for education. I’ll keep digging. I borrowed the cheesecake from Dave Winer.

PlaybackTime notes open source fonts from Bitstream (press release here).

Ripple Training has many updates; Steve’s look at smart technologies from small vendors; on the new Final Cut Express, he offers a review and a bunch of his usual high quality, savable QuickTime-format training clips; and for Final Cut Pro, a clip on applying multiple filters in a technique he calls filter packs.

Ken Stone posts a review of a comparison shoot between the new 24 fps progressive mode DV camera from Panasonic, the AGDVX100, and the Sony PD-150. Seems authoritative and professional.

Make sure to check the latest from Judy and Robert’s Little QuickTime Page, especially links for troubleshooting things QuickTime 6.1 breaks, updated information about QuickTime Streaming Server, and some nice tools for making your QuickTime-laden web page all friendly-like for your users.

Jim Kanter reminds me that Photoshop 7 has an update to 7.0.1. And hey! a nice tutorial for making title-safe overlays in Photoshop for your broadcast projects.

This is interesting – Nels Johnson at DV.com: “Deliver Video with PowerPoint and Acrobat: Two common business apps let you deliver compelling video presentations that every business user can play.” (free registration required.)——-

I don’t have time today to elaborate on yesterday’s little essay; please read it. Links about recent developments in video and multimedia will follow soon. In the meantime, tell your legislators that we need the freedom to use our own tools and artistic creations, and that poorly thought-out copyright protection may cost educators that freedom.——-

Charles Wiltgen’s comments about the efforts by the recording industry to affect copyright, so-called “digital rights management,” and fair use are in line with his always pragmatic – sometimes (justifiably) cynical – assessments of the issues. I am not the only educator who depends on the ability to create, copy, and distribute recordings of audio and video in different formats. Teachers who use and teach video, like any independent producer, face the possibility of losing the advantages we’ve gained with inexpensive pro-quality video production equipment. I have yet to see the needs of educational producers or other independents addressed.

Already the industry-sponsored DMCA criminalizes even a web link to another website that provides software for fair use (in this case, making a copy of user-owned DVDs so they can be watched on a Linux computer). The worst-case scenario (and though unlikely, it’s worth keeping in mind) is a complete block of our ability to produce and distribute our work in widely accepted formats. Another possibility is a burdensome registration-and-fee regime, requiring some sort of authentication before we could use the tools and codecs used by industry studios. Whatever the particulars of the result, I believe the primary effort of the music, movie, and television industries is to re-create barriers to entry into the distribution of “content” (what a contemptuous word for film, video, music, writing – another topic). Their desire to regain total control the distribution of their material could mean the loss of our ability to control distribution of our material. They could, in other words, make criminals of us. If we let them.

I’ll have more to say on this soon.——-