DV for Teachers

“Now in its fourth iteration, iDVD 4 has reached a high level [of] sophistication, with some of the advanced features found in professional DVD authoring software (i.e. chapter markers). New to iDVD 4, is the ability to create DVD’s of up to two hours in length. iDVD 4 has several additional new features (transitions for photos in slideshows and a Map feature), that are missing in the more advanced DVD Studio Pro 2. iDVD 4 is still ‘drag and drop’ easy to use.”

I’m teaching an intro to iDVD this afternoon. Thanks for the nice guide, Ken.——-

UserLand used to have links to the NY Times RSS feeds here. They moved them today to one of the blogs Dave Winer has set up at Harvard after I asked Doc Searls if he knew why my aggregator didn’t load them any more. Well, someone (Dave, presumably) moved the links over, but hasn’t checked them out yet. As of this writing, they’re still going 404.——-

Extreme Tech’s Video Codec Shootout compares four codecs and puts Apple’s MPEG-4 codec a blocky fourth place.——-

I worked with Alton Brown on a video my first year here at the ITC. The video was to teach new Americans – recent immigrants – about the USDA Food Pyramid. I came across his site today, browsing on a day off, and found this list of recipes. The Baked Stuffed Jalapeno Peppers… mmmmmm.——-

Take a look at this daily blog packed with html and css tips for making your blog look like your blog, not an out-of-the-box template. It’s also a great reference for quick tips regardless of the type of site you’re working on. One of these days I’ll do some template/style-sheet tweaking myself.——-

Chris Breen’s Mac 911 blog at Macworld points to cf/x’s iMovie Plug-ins page, where you’ll find sixty-four iMovie plug-ins, most just $1.50 to $3.50, one at $9.95 (seems expensive, but only by comparison with the others), and more than a third of them FREE.

Tweak your iMovies, add effects Apple didn’t include, and save a bundle. Precise color control, add old-timey cinema flicker with varying intensity, use edge-detect to make the video look like an animated pencil-line drawing. how about a $3 chromakey plugin? I have just tested the edge-detect, and like it alot. The QuickTime example clips for each one look really great. ——-

While looking for LCD projector purchasing advice for someone in the college, I came across this nice tutorial on the ever-popular video in PowerPoint at Presentations.com. They key bits of info are to use the MPEG format. They used Adobe Premiere 6.5 for the article, which has an MPEG encoder; nice, but not inexpensive. I use discreet cleaner for compressing MPEG, and it isn’t inexpensive either. Which leads to the question, what’s the best compromise between compression quality and price for making cross-platform mpg files for use in PPT?
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if you produce web video, or if you use web video, then you know about Real Player. Real is much more difficult to install uninvasively, without changing a host of settings media types and spamming you to try their for-fee services. Read Tomas Jogin’s “Real Obnoxious” for a knowledgeable and sometimes salty discussion about the worst aspects of this player, as well as links to alternative players and informed suggestions for routing around it.

If you still need or want to download and use the Real player (“RealOne” these days), you can bypass all the attempts to get you to buy their “premium” service and get the player here.

Via John Gruber’s Daring Fireball——-

The presentation went well, and we had a good reaction. I got a live comment during the session – when I showed off the post I made during Hilary’s talk – from someone from LiveText who was in the session. Ah, live blogging.——-

Hilary is speaking now – presenting about our weblog collaboration with her students. Four people in the audience – nice turnout, by the way – had heard of blogs when we started. Traction!