DV for Teachers

Quote: “This week we published our fifty-second collection of
downloads in our weekly series of tools and utilities for creative
professionals. Since, as of this writing, we have no one central
repository for all of these items, and since hunting through our
archives can be somewhat daunting, it seems appropriate to organize the
last year’s efforts into a single, easily browsable index. Here it is,
along with links to downloads we’ve provided this year outside the
realm of the Weekly Download series, but free nevertheless.

Our
downloads over the last year have spanned a variety of categories and
applications, from action/title safety generators for Photoshop to
Paint Synth patches for Synthetik Studio Artist. I’ve decided to
organize these alphabetically by the company, host program, and
sub-categories, where appropriate. Each link takes you to the page of
the software, showing you examples and providing download and
installation instructions on the following page. And, of course, all of
the downloads are free and available for you to use in your creative
productions with no strings attached. “——-

Quote: “For this series of tutorials weíre going to look at using HTML as a
delivery system for QuickTime ó various ways of putting QuickTime onto
a web page, or opening the QuickTime player from a web page. Delivering
QuickTime on a web page is simplicity itself when using progressive
download ó whatís sometimes referred to as http streaming. This is the
same time of ìstreamingî that is used on the Apple movie trailer site,
and it will usually give your viewers the widest range of options and
the highest quality. RTP/RTSP, or ìtrueî streaming requires a special
server and configuration and weíll be dealing with that in a later
tutorial.I thought I’d kick off this trio of tutorials with a
discussion of MIME types, why they are important to QuickTime and how
to use them.”



Comment: More
good tips for putting your QuickTime videos where people will see them – students, colleagues, other audiences. This is how independents can
promote and distribute their work!

Quote: “What is DiVA? DiVA is a video re-encoder for Mac OS X
10.2 or later designed for converting between MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 video
sources into MPEG-4 video. It utilizes special features in the 3ivx
video codec to allow for high speed and high quality.”

Comment: I haven’t tested this yet, but they promise quite a bit:
extremely fast MPEG-4 compression playable on any media player that
will decode MPEG-4, including, they say, Windows Media Player. This has
me quite interested.——-

The folks at Ken Stone keep it up:

“Aside from the more noticeable, new features of Final Cut Pro 4, there have also been refinements and changes to the way existing functions work. Specifically, and also the focus of this article, are the new Timeline controls that affect how we perform many different everyday functions. These new Timeline controls, the Patch Panel and Auto Select controls replace the original targeting controls.”

“Welcome to the Berklee Shares Web site. Here you will find free
music lessons that you can download, share and trade with your friends
and fellow musicians.

Berklee Shares is:
* Individual self-contained music lessons developed by Berklee faculty and alumni.

• Free and open to the music community around the world.
  
• A library of MP3 audio, QuickTime movie, and PDF files.
  
• A glimpse into the educational opportunities provided by Berklee.”
  
  
  Comment: A large archive of online learning tools from a prestigious music school. See what might serve your curriculum.
  
  ——-

Quote: “In order to work through this tutorial, you will at least
need to know how to create and execute either a Perl or shell script.
It also helps to know the Terminal command line, some Terminal
commands, and some Perl. You can refresh your Terminal hacks by taking
a look at Chris Stone’s Learning the Terminal series right here on Mac
DevCenter.”

Comment: Oof. I really need to learn more
about scripting and managing the server. One lovely recommendation
about OS X Server is that I’ve been running one for over a year,
streaming videos and serving Manila blogs and in general not paying
much attention to it and it’s been just working. Nice.

——-

Quote: “”The FCC today has taken a step that will shape the
future of television,” said EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney
Fred von Lohmann. “Sadly, this represents a step in the wrong
direction, a step that will undermine innovation, fair use, and
competition.”“

Comment: I worry that this will make it
more difficult for independent producers, educators among them, to
distribute their work. A nasty bit of business.

——-

Quote: “Fuji 48x CD-R media 100pk for $10 shipped after rebate
11:42 am BestBuy.com and retail stores offer the Fuji 48x CD-R media
100-pack for $24.99 before a $15 mail-in rebate, $9.99 after. Shipping
is free. Offer ends November 15, 2003. “

Comment: Dealmac
and Dealnews find great buys all over the web. I check them regularly – today’s highlight is a 100-pack of brand-name CD-ROM blanks for a dime
per disk after rebate. Media-producing teachers, rejoice.
——-

Quote: “This guide is the second in a series on the Art of Video
Capture, Clean-up, and Compression (Part I is here). This guide deals
exclusively with the second step: Video Clean-up. While many of the
lessons to be learned in this guide apply to all platforms, this guide
is written from the perspective of PC-based hardware, running Microsoft
Windows (and is largely MS OS version agnostic).”

Comment:  Ars Technica offers a guide, using mostly open-source applications. These guys pay good attention to details.

——-

Quote: “Make your very own church sign, kinda like the ones you see here. Just enter some text and click the ‘Go’ button.”

Comment: This
is just silly, but I like it. Ellen in her travels is collecting
pictures of church signs. Some of them are pretty good. I’ll let her
post those on her site when it’s up and running.

——-