Rep. Ashe serves the 42nd House District in Georgia, and I’m showin her around the ITC. We’re discussing technology and education, and the hurdles and promise involved in using technology to help all students learn.
Drag. I’ve read Judy and Robert’s site – and more than one of their books – regularly for years now, and found many of my best tips about QT from them. They sa I’ll check in with QuickTiming.org, which I don’t remember seeing before now…
[moments later] Well, I should have poked around QuickTiming.org sooner! Very good tips, many new, as well as tutorials, links to QT tools – some exclusive to them – and other QT riches. I’ll miss Judy and Robert’s wide-ranging updates, but QuickTiming.org will ease the pain a bit. Best of luck to them.——-
DV Magazine’s August issue has an inspiring article [annoying registration required] about National Geographic videographer and documentarian Sam Burbank. Burbank uses affordable, common tools along with his experience, imagination, and dedication to make quality video in difficult circumstances.——-
In the July of Video Systems magazine, Tom Patrick McAuliffe reviews Apple’s Final Cut Express. An enthusiastic review, he tests it successfully on a group of machines, including a blue and white G3 that must be at least 3 years old, and also worked on the same project in FCP 2, iMovie 2, and iMovie 3. The comparisons will help any Mac user who has used any of those programs make an informed decision about FCE. (The video he created for the review, a promo piece for entertainer Tom Patrick, is posted at http://www.tompatrick.com/mov.html.) Remember that Video Systems is a trade magazine intended for a professional audience. I found this curious statement in his otherwise solid review:
“The one thing you have to admit-
even those who are die-hard Windows fans-is that Apple has truly made pro-quality visual media production idiot-proof.”
I’m not a die-hard Windows fan, and that’s not accurate from my experience. I’ve helped folks with some experience try to figure out FCE, and they were no idiots. It’s a more complex interface than iMovie, and requires more patience to learn than he implies. Nevertheless, his review remains a good source of information and comparisons to Apple’s other editing applications.
Steve Mullen’s guide to getting started with it explains some of the non-idiot-proof aspects of FCE, particularly the many preference settings needed to begin—you have to go to five different menus to get things going the first time, prior to actual capture and editing. Once set up, FCE is a powerful and very useful application, and with educational discounts, offers exceptional power and flexibility for learning editing and compositing.
The articles aren’t online yet (I received the print copy today, and they post articles about a month after print publication), but it’s worth looking for.
——-Alan Bennet, an Apple Education employee in the U.K., posted an excellent essay on the good uses of digital video in the classroom, by teachers and students. It’s not a pro-Apple ad, necessarily; it emphasizes Apple’s ease of use, but good tools could do this on any platform. I’m posting an extended excerpt here, but please read the whole thing:
“A piece of video on a web site or CD-Rom is a true ICT resource. To illustrate this let’s look at a typical example – the use of DV in a science experiment:
- DV can be used by pupils as a measuring device. Using a stopwatch to time parachute drops is notoriously difficult. However by filming the drop and using iMovie you can not only slow the footage down, but also use the editing tools to cut the clip to the points at which the parachute is released and when it hits the ground. The length of the clip is the same as the time it took for the object to fall.
- The same DV footage can be used to show how the experiment was set up and what happened when specific variables were changed. DV in this instance becomes a communication tool, enabling pupils to show others what they hoped to achieve, what they did and what happened.
- The finished movie provides the teacher with evidence of varying forms, such as the contribution of individual pupils, interaction within groups and so on.”
I looked around more on the site of this article – NESTA Futurelab – and though it’s got some of the usual too-fancy Flash intros that waste everyone’s time, there are numerous posts of value here for the educator who wants to find effective ways to use technology to teach. I particularly liked “Will ICT deliver?” by Ralph Tabberer, Chief Executive, Teacher Training Agency. He asks the questions we all must keep asking, of ourselves, our administrators, the political bodies who fund education, and the software and hardware developers: is this technology that will make a real difference to students?
Information technology delights and frustrates me. It has done for years. At its best, it adds something very special to education. It can work as a powerful motivator. It can give learners unique access to knowledge and understanding.
But it will also sometimes distract, use up valuable time for marginal activities or, worse still, waste time completely.
Very good stuff.
——-Charles Roberts explains how to use FCP’s Media Manager: capture and edit in low-res/offline mode, and recapture only what you need in high-res for online finishing, rendering, and output. And the article has a snazzy title. At Ken Stone’s FCP site, along with a great overview of SoundTrack, the audio editor included with FCP4 and now sold individually as well ($299 retail, to schools for $149 and much less for a site license).
——-Ray is a Theater professor here at Georgia State, and he asked me about a web site for his portfolio, and his classes…. What else would I show him?——-
Loren Miller provides a detailed list of OS X interface enhancements at the LA Final Cut Pro Users Group site. Great freeware and shareware apps and utilities for making the computer work the way you want it to.——-
Ripple Training, online home of Steve Martin, Final Cut Pro trainer extraordinaire (I took the 3-day DV Revolution workshop with him when he was with dvcreators.net), has a new look and some new training material and reviews. I’ve downloaded many of his excellent QuickTime tutorial clips, and refer to them often.
I just read his review of the Citidisk DV, which connects to your DV camera via FireWire, recording the video on the disk as you’re recording it on tape. Plug it into your edit system again via Firewire, and bling your clips are there, ready to edit. Rewind your tape and stick it on your storage shelf as the source of last resort, since you may never touch it again. It’s battery powered and can charge when connected to your computer while editing. Steve acknowledges some limitations, but sums up,
”...the movies that are recorded to the drive noticeably lack a timecode track. This of course means that should your drive go “belly up” in the middle of editing, you will not be able to capture the original source clips from tape because the clips in your project do not reference the clips on the tape. In fact, they don’t reference anything at all. Depending on your production workflow this could be bad. But here’s another way to look at it: the drive has the potential to save you countless hours of having to log and capture your source tapes. Whether timecode is a critical concern is for you to decide. For me, time is more critical than timecode and this drive has removed one large, time-consuming chunk from the whole non-linear process. And for that I welcome this drive.”
Steve’s got big credibility with me, and if he likes it, I believe in it. The drive is made by Shining Technology.