DV for Teachers

Quote: “Wide acceptance of a format in the market place is about the only yardstick that we have for knowing what to purchase in this time of change, and even then we have to look for products that can take wear and tear in the a school setting. This is our challenge right now as media specialists, but this is also presenting us with an opportunity”

Comment: Considered recommendations for purchasing DV equipment for schools – and I didn’t know about this Panasonic camera, the AG-DVC7, a shoulder-style single-chip camcorder (MSRP $1350, around $1000 via Google price search).——-

“RealProducer 10 Basic
RealProducer Basic is perfect for users who want to create high-quality RealAudio 10 and RealVideo 10, but donít need advanced professional features.”

Real has the most obnoxious player – it takes over your preferences and nags nags nags. But its codecs work well over really small bitrates. I don’t know if this version will work from GSU’s existing Real server or even if the files can download to Real player from a standard Web server. Much to study here.——-

This session was mostly a lit review of publications about desktop video conferencing (DVC) – a broad list of suggestions for implementation and use.

Lloyd Onyett of Indiana University of Pennsylvania has used DVC (Polycom) for eval and assessment of student teachers; often couldn’t get from observer to classroom through firewalls, but 1-way A/V from classroom, 2-way chat model works well. Observe, enter notes in chat window, then after class stu. teacher reads/responds to them, discusses with evaluators/assessors. Problem: based on NetMeeting which he understands is to be phased out by MS. I suggested he look at QT Broadcaster; no Win version yet, but I’ll continue to see if there’s a free/cheap equivalent (or a kludge).

Lloyd, the Associate Dean for IT at his College of Education at IUP, talked about the incentive his college used to get reluctant professors to take technology training: once the professors created their own e-portfolios, they received a $500 grant. I think that’s a good idea. Here’s IUP’s Portfolio Assistance Center, which also seems a good idea.

(I realized I had never posted this when Janet sent me her paper today. Thanks, Janet.)——-

“Given the adoption of Microsoft’s Windows Media Video 9 by the DVD Forum, there’s increasing reason to believe, to paraphrase an old Southern expression, that the MPEG-4 dog just won’t hunt. It hasn’t yet and probably never will, at least in any serious commercial way.”

Hmmm. Win Media can look really good… but I don’t like the client/player and I don’t know enough about the variety of tools on Windows. This bears watching.——-

Quote: “So how do we make this one minute movie small enough for the internet? During the process of creating the QuickTime movie, we will be adjusting a number of different parameter, each one will help reduce the size of the file . It is by varying each of these QT parameters that we control quality and size. Before we get to the actual process of creating a QT movie for the web, we need to look at each of the QT parameters that we have at our disposal.”

Comment: Oh, man. I’ve sung the praises of Ken Stone before, but this article is just so-o-o good – a step-by-step primer on QuickTime compression. Though Ken constantly writes about exporting from Final Cut, these same settings and expectations are available when exporting from iMovie and most when using QuickTime Pro for Windows. Ken’s an extremely enthusiastic self-taught video maven, and it shows – he couches the technical points pretty clearly for other excited amateurs, uses lots and lots of screenshots, and adds red arrows so you know exactly what he’s talking about.——-

Quote: “As you might expect, the latest encoding tool from RealNetworks offers great new codecs for audio and video. There are also some helpful features that can make your encoding process more flexible and more efficient. We’ll take a look at what’s new in the RealProducer Plus 10 preview release.”

Comment: There’s a QuickTime export plug-in on the way as well, which will allow Mac-based NLEs to export directly to Real… and in light of the NY Times’ report that Real has approached Apple to join together, that would be most welcome. QuickTime doesn’t have the best codecs at this point, either in picture quality or compression, but it does have aadvantages for educators Real and Microsoft can’t yet touch: a huge variety of editing tools, from so-cheap-they’re-practically-free to top-of-the-line, and fast-start “streaming” from any web server.——-

Just back from a too-brief weekend at Jekyll Island, where the pollen continued to harass me despite the breezes from off shore. I’ve never suffered so much from the sex lives of plants before, despite living in Atlanta, where spring brings pollen so heavy the mud can turn yellow after a rain.——-

“Over the years, I’ve worked on and observed dozens of productions from small student projects to multihour documentary series and movies of the week. The successful productions have all shared two factors-organization and discipline. The teams that made these productions successes reconciled the seemingly irreconcilable by bringing organization to the creative process.”

dv.com requires free registration——-

This isn’t related to DV or education, but I have the day off and I found something as bloggable as ever. I read Boing Boing because it’s a great group blog that covers pop culture, politics, science fiction, technology, and places where those and other topics overlap. Yesterday they posted a link to They’re Coming to Get You, Barbara, a site of home-brewed horror movie reviews. I’m not a horror movie fan, but Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing found something special there.

Last fall, it seems, the site posted pictures of a cake they made for their annual pumpkin carving party “Pumpkinfest.” The cake was a replica of a human thorax, complete with rib cage and organs that seeped appropriately-colored sauces when sliced for serving….

This reminds me of the early really fun days of the web, when browsing the web was actual browsing, not knowing just what I’d come across.——-