DV for Teachers

MacMinute notes that several Firewire drive manufacturers have released firmware updates to address the data loss issue. Via Rob McNair-Huff’s Mac Net Journal.——-

Shameful. Reports from today’s Macintouch* cite warnings from Apple and manufacturers of external Firewire drives – WiebeTech, LaCie, OWC – about potential data loss on such drives. Read the reports, and if you use a Firewire drive for your video, use caution and wait for an all clear before installing the upgrade.

APPLE SHOULD HAVE PREVENTED THIS.

This major upgrade, highly touted for months, should have been thoroughly vetted for such errors. Firewire is Apple technology, and they sell these systems as “it just works” for video editing. This is a huge headache for users and a major embarrassment for Apple. Apple should eat some heaping helpings of crow over this one.

*Macintouch doesn’t use permalinks for inital reports, so this link won’t go direct to the Firewire issue after they update the page. I’ll come back and add a more direct link to their archive in the next few days.——-

If you use external FireWire drives, please hesitate before installing
the new Mac OS X “Panther” – various user sites are reporting
corruptions and lost date on FW drives connected during installation
and/or reboots under Panther. I always wait before putting upgrades
on.

Among the work I’ve been doing lately is burning CDs of student
teaching. With a DV camcorder on a tripod in a corner of the classroom,

students record themselves teaching a lesson for their professors to
review and critique. Being able to do this from a CD-ROM-based
QuickTime movie makes it really easy for them to move quickly through
the video to find the particular section they need, based on timecode.
It also allows them to easily duplicate it, for sharing and backup.
This used to require a lot of time – capturing the video, with the
attendant consumption of huge amounts of drive space, and then
compressing it with Cleaner.

As I’ve
written before, now I use QuickTime Broadcaster. I only
have to run the tape once, and I have a high-quality file I burn to
CD. I can now turn around a 1-hour video on CD in about an hour and
20 minutes, with my hands actually on the equipment for maybe five
minutes of that time. Nice, efficient, useful.

Here’s where a reminder of the comparison with Windows Movie Maker returns. Movie Maker is a nice little app in its own right, but it doesn’t
do everything we need it to. It offers a nice set of
features and pleases the Windows users who don’t trust Macs, but I
don’t recommend it for making video for the Web unless you want the
hassle of buying the proprietary server from Microsoft. Capture and
Export using DV-AVI, then open in QuickTime Pro and export at 320 x
240, Sorenson or H263, 15 fps, keyframe about every 10 seconds (more
often if there’s a lot of movement in the video), and make sure you
check “Fast Start.” Create your links with the wonderful Embedded Media HTML
Generator from the Center for Instructional
Technology at the University of California – San Francisco,
upload, and start pointing people to your neat-o online
video.

This has become a recurring problem… capturing video via QuickTime Broadcaster direct to a compressed format. I burn the file to a CD-R, take it to Windows XP, double-click on the movie file and get this error:

Couldn’t open the file “movie.mov” because the file was not found.

Then I copy the file to the XP machine’s drive, and it plays like it was made there.

?????

[Later] Okay – more detail. The files are burned with the OS X Finder Disc Burn utility. The CDs are readable on Windows machines, but the QT file won’t play from the disc. Is the problem in Disc Burn?

I gave an ITC workshop today – more of a demo really – “Freeware for Teachers.” I showed a number of free applications, some open source, that I think teachers at many levels would find useful. See the list here.

Do you know of a free- or shareware app that might be helpful to teachers from elementary to university? Let me know.——-

[See all my blog posts about Free Software. I also recently discovered two pages of links to Windows freeware – Nedwolf and this good blog-post-and-discussion at a site called Brilliant Ignorance. He followed up with a Mac list and discussion a few days later. Updated 26 August 2005]

Here’s a list of the free applications (and maybe a few cheapies) that I talk about in the Freeware for Teachers workshop:

Business & Productivity

WordPad – the word processor included with every version of Windows since Windows 95! You don’t need Word to do word processing.

Open Office – free office applications, including word processing, presentation, spreadsheet, drawing and graphics, even database tools; saves and opens MS Office formats

Image Editors

IrfanView – image editor, viewer, format converter, make slide-shows really quickly (a teacher favorite)

Picasa – Google’s free image editor, with lots of good features

ImageWell, a great little combined image editor and upload engine – one-stop shopping, from your camera to your server, if you don’t need industrial strength image editing along the way (and we are teachers, right? Who’s got time for Photoshop?)

Web Browsers, HTML Editors, Security

Firefox – a fully-featured browser that is HTML Standards compliant (unlike Microsoft’s Internet Explorer!), also with tabbed browsing and a pop-up ad blocker (worth a lot more than free right there). It lacks Mozilla’s email client and HTML editor, but includes built-in RSS support. And it’s rapidly becoming the browser of choice for millions tired of the problems they suffer with IE. If you look at nothing else on this page, look and look hard at Firefox.

Mozilla – also a fully-featured browser (tabbed browsing, pop-up ad blocker) that is standards compliant, but with a nice integrated email client and a full-featured HTML editor – think Netscape without all the AOL and advertising junk.

NVU – full-featured HTML authoring application that is open source; runs on Mac, Windows, Linux. Recommended.

Web Album Generator – create photo album pages – thumbnails and all – ready for upload to your site

JAlbum – also generates photo album pages. It’s Java-based, and runs on any platform

Ad-Aware – find and remove the “adware” that can take over your browser

Website and Weblog Tools

Blogger – get your own free weblog, an easy-to-update site for keeping notes, informing students, family friends. Now owned by Google. Beware the “next blog” links; they may go to non-school-safe sites.

WordPress – WordPress is a free, open source blogging tool gaining immense popularity. Many hosting providers (not free, unfortunately) support 3-click WordPress installations. I use it at my personal site.


Edublogs.org – Offering free WordPress blogs to educators, no questions asked, as of the end of July 2005, though still working the kinks out. An excellent way to learn about blogging.

Movable Type – very popular website (“weblog”) management system; they changed their licensing in May 2004; a limited free version is still available (requires domain hosting service which may not be free)

Photobucket.com – blurb from their site: “provides free image hosting for Ebay, live journals, blogs, message boards, and online photo albums. Photobucket is reliable, fast and very simple to use.” Recommended by edubloggers I trust, but I haven’t used it.

Multimedia/Audio/Video
Audacity – full-feature multitrack sound recorder and editor; exports wav, aiff, MP3, ogg; use filters and effects plugins

Freecorder – make recordings direct to MP3 format from your mic or your sound input

VLC – a multi-platform video player – plays almost any format

WinAmp – audio/video player and Internet streaming radio application

iTunes – an excellent, easy to use music application – rip CDs, listen to internet radio streams, create playlists. The gold standard for online music applications – Mac or Windows

Streamripper – Make your computer a Tivo for radio. Streamripper records MP3 streams (and only MP3) and Internet radio: NPR, music, etc. (Here’s a Mac version.) Streamripper already includes address for several streaming sites, but you can find public radio streams at Public Radio Fan.

There’s lots more out there. Many of these programs will run on Windows, Mac OS 9 and OS X, and Linux. Go ye and download.
——-

What if you could use an adapted version of this Belkin
iPod Voice Recorder

as a dialog recorder and just drag and
drop the audio files to your NLE? Hmmm? Yes, it’s very interesting.
Shame I have an older iPod that won’t accept this. Hmm… off to
eBay?
——-

Tutorial

#26 from Stephen Schleicher’s series of Final Cut Pro tips at
Creative Mac.
See the bottom of page 2 for
links
to the other 25 tutorials.
——-

Kevin Byrd, Atlanta-based* designer: “How do you choose color? One
methodology we recently employed aimed at collecting naturally
occurring color combinations. Yep, we took images of all of our eyes.
Those images were then exported out of Fireworks as a gif which
reduced the color palette to a manageable 16 colors.” I’m planning to
try this idea for the colors in my next video graphics project… and
probably my personal website too.

• A complete coincidence.
  

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