DV for Teachers

“If other states go the way of California, as many expect, there is
about to be a lot of bad news surrounding No Child Left Behindóand a
serious chance that No Child Left Behind will itself be left behind.”
Alexander Russo looks at the state of this law, and finds good and bad
intentions, poor planning by the proponents, generally little success
and plenty of blame to spread around. Ah, education.
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I mean, why not? I should have thought of this when posting the other
day about available export options with Windows Movie Maker. Video
captured in DV-AVI format with Movie Maker should open and export in
any of QuickTime Pro’s available codecs for playback on other systems
from web, CD, or internal drive.

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“Letís begin this section by looking at how to light a semi-transparent object
like a champagne bottle.” From Stephen Schleicher’s step-by-step tutorial
for tweaking your lights to make glass and other semi-transparent
objects look their best on video. Very clear photos included. [Find his
previous tutorials here. I had to use Google to find them; the search on the DMN/Creative Mac site didn’t find one of them.]

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Audacity is an open-source
audio recorder and editor that runs on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. With the LAME encoder, you can export in MP3 format for tiny,
universally-playable distribution. You can also use the open-source
format Ogg Vorbis, which seems to be gaining adherents. Going to a
conference? Record right to your laptop. Send audio email. Post audio
clips to your site (like this: [Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “adrSiteRootTable” hasn’t been defined.]
.) Use it for foreign
language instruction. Record radio programs to listen to on your MP3
player. Practice your lines for the school play. It’s a great little
app. And. It’s. Free. Yessss.——-

[UPDATE: I changed the link for this post to the same article at Ken
Stone’s excellent Final Cut Pro help page. Fie on 2-pop for busting its
links yet again, and praise for Chawla, Ken, and the readers who notify
me of my mistakes.]



Charles Roberts:

Dan Coplan
uses a chip chart, a DV camera and Final Cut Pro’s waveform monitor on
his iBook to analyze the effects under- and over-exposure. Better, he
finds, to under-expose one stop and correct in post than over-expose – or rely too much on auto-exposure – and lose necessary detail in blown
out highlights. Many NLEs include waveform monitors now; use Dan’s method for an easy-to-understand demonstration for your students.  

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This Microsoft article compares serving Windows Media via a web server and a streaming server. Both will work, but without the Windows Media Services streaming server,
the client machine must download the entire file before it can begin
playing. This means that for clips longer than a few seconds,
especially on non-broadband clients, WMV files can take a while to get
going. The MS proprietary streaming server offers more rights
management, streaming through firewalls, and many other features
desirable for large organizations with high demand and the personnel to
manage the infrastructure. Yet I’m certain most schools won’t or can’t
try to deal with that.



There’s another issue here, as well: the WMV files produced by Windows
Movie Maker are either in DV-AVI format or Windows Media 9 format.
DV-AVI is a native DV format, the file type iMovie used for example,
and exactly what’s on MiniDV tape. It’s an open standard with a 3.5 MB
per second data rate, which is way too large for the web without further compression. If the file needs more work at that point,

and you need to work with an existing system in your school or lab, it makes more sense to purchase Discreet’s Cleaner, add a FireWire card if necessary, and compress to an easier-to-stream format (see below).



WMV offers us no advantage over the procedure we use now. Most of the
time, we capture on a Mac G4, compress with Cleaner to WMV, Real, or QT
as needed.If they want video in PowerPoint, I compress to MPEG-1 which
looks nice and scales very well onscreen and plays in a wide variety of
players. Windows Media 9 format plays only on Windows XP systems, according to this page. If your audience is on a Mac or hasn’t all moved to XP, then they can’t see it.



QuickTime’s fast start or – “progressive download” – allows the first part of a clip to start playing while the rest
downloads in the background, and it works on a regular web server. If
we need to do true streaming, we have the QuickTime Streaming Server on
a Mac OS X server, but it’s available as Darwin Streaming Server for Windows, Linux, and Solaris… for free. Apple also offers a free DV capture tool called HackTV
for Windows. [Correction: HackTV for Windows isn’t working for me yet on my test machine.]  With that and the $30 QuickTime Pro, you can capture, do
basic editing, and export to a fast-start format that will play in
QuickTime on Mac or Windows. After checking all this out, I’ll now
offer folks the choice of WMV9 files, easily captured and basically
edited, only if they need a quick clip in PowerPoint for Windows here
on campus. Otherwise, for web or any other use, I’ll suggest QuickTime
all the way.
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The first capture, at default settings, went perfectly; 19.49 seconds,
bit rate of 399 kbps, and a file size of just over a MB. Smooth,
picture looks good, but approximately 3 MB per second is rather a large
file size, if someone needs to move a file to another machine that’s
more than a few minutes. Next: “Video for broadband (150 kbps)” which
is basically the same as the default capture but half the frame rate,
15 fps.



[...] It’s awkward that it requires naming the file before capture; not
a convention I’m used to. It does remember the previous capture
settings and location, so that’s a convenience. The capture looks fine;
playback is smooth for 15 fps. Next test: “Video for local playback
(2.1 Mbps) with a resolution of 640×480.



[...] It looks very nice. Nice to see a Windows multimedia application
work the first time without any hassles. Now let’s see about editing
and posting to a web page.

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New Department here at DV for Teachers: Windows Movie Maker.
It’s for the many instructors and students who need (“need”? Well, at
least they “want”) to put video clips seamlessly into PowerPoint.



I’m testing version 2 today, installing it on a
Dell Inspiron 8200 and connecting to a Sony DCR-TRV900.
The download and installation went fine. Working my way through the
Wizard, the default is what I’d been looking for: 320×240 resolution
at 30 frames per second, with variable bit rate compression. What all
this means is that if it’s successful, the task of taking video and
putting it into presentations will likely have gotten easier for all
involved.
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