DV for Teachers

Larry Jordan has been contributing numerous excellent articles to Ken Stone’s fine page for a while now. As a group, they focus on proper maintenance of your system and file organization, so you can focus on your editing. All solid, all valuable. Following his advice and that of Chawla, another prolific Ken Stone contributor, has given me more confidence as an editor and teacher of editing.

His site tells me he’s one of the first four FCP-Advanced trainers in the US, and he’s started his own FCP newsletter.

Ken Stone’s happy minions continue to keep FCP users well informed.——-

News on upcoming digital photography products and technology from O’Reilly’s Derrick Story.——-

Got a great DVD you’ve made, and you want a good looking copy in a smaller file size? Mac OS X Hints, a fount of usefulness, posts a guide with worthy comments on how to convert DVDs to Divx – saving space, saving the need to carry disks, and providing valuable experience regarding file size vs. image quality.——-

“The Embedded Media HTML Generator. has been developed to ease the burden of inserting video and animations into web pages. Please select the type of media you wish to embed in your web page…”

I linked to this before, but I had occasion to show this to a user who was having trouble getting his QT movies to show properly on IE6 for Windows (surprise).

Just like all  the other Mozilla variants I’ve tried to use to
post to my Manila sites, this one eats the first draft of the post.
Here’s what I typed first:



Let’s see if Firefox eats this post the way Mozilla does when I click on “Create News Item.”



And sure enough, it did. I copied it just in case; the new post came up
empty. I sure would like to have a WYSIWYG posting interface on my Mac,
but it ain’t here yet. Nuts.

——-

The Special Education-Assistive Technology folks here had made video clips for a CD-ROM they also wanted to stream via the web. Their assistant asked me for help… they were MPGs, and he could convert them to QuickTime with QuickTime Pro, but no audio…. Hrmmm. I haven’t found anything that successfully converts it. Yet.

While searching, however, I came across Mighty Coach, a site with some helpful tutorials on Windows Movie Maker, among other programs. Pay particular attention to the tip on project organization and avoiding accidental deletions of important files.

Keep your iMovie 2 CD and/or download handy:

“Unlike iPhoto 4, which is noticeably more responsive than its predecessor, the latest revision of iMovie is as sluggish as ever. As projects get bigger, one sees the Spinning Beach Ball of Death ever more frequently as the program churns and churns away over actions as simple as shifting an audio clip or using the new direct trimming feature…”.

This looks promising – an estimated 20 GB drive connected to your DV
cam’s firewire port, recording your clips as you go. There have been
other drives like this I’ve seen reviewed, and they keep coming.
Eventually, this type of technology will kill tape. Imagine, though,
one of these incorporating an iPod-like interface for previews
onscreen, a headphone jack to check the sound… every video student
will have one for her projects and her music.——-