DV for Teachers

“Limited $$$? You Can Still Videoconference! Alternative Tools for the Modest Budget”

Scott Merrick is just getting going on this cheap videoconference tools session... beforehand he got connections from his wirelessly connected PC laptop to a Mac laptop in Kobe Japan, with picture and voice. That alone impressed me. More to come.

Scott is from the University School of Nashville, where he teaches technology to K-4 kids.

He really likes iVisit and Yahoo! Messenger, loathes AOL, had good experiences with Apple’s iChat. He makes clear that attempting this requires “the perserverence gene,” requires experimentation to know what can grow wrong and how to troubleshoot it. He’s right.

Just praised UptoTen.com as a very well designed site, with games, animations, as well as age- and developmentally-appropriate tools for K-2 kids, but he says his third graders like it too.

He’s now talking to Kobe Japan again; that guy’s using a DV cam connected to his Mac laptop via FireWire. He’s using the mic on the laptop for the sound, but he said he could use the mic on the cam. This apparent cross-platform connection is excellent – good in quality but it opens a potential bottleneck.

[I’m going to post this to my home page at this point and follow up in a subsequent post.]——-

Several good listings there today:

Laine Lee has posted a procedure for creating a bootable DVD for Mac OS X:
If you found yourself working on a computer that was so overcome by viruses that it couldn’t maintain a viable network connection long enough to get patches, wouldn’t it be nice to pull a DVD out of your backpack and put your own customized system load set back onto it so you could start using it again right away?

Philip Rinehart emailed us a note about a new “white paper”, which he co-authored, about managing Mac OS X systems:
Richard Glaser, University of Utah; and Philip Rinehart, Yale University; macosxlabs.org steering committee members have written an extensive white paper on Mac OS X Application Management. The paper thoroughly covers Mac OS X application management. Topics include: licensing models, security considerations, reviewing installations, missing Mac OS X applications, missing Mac OS X features, distribution tools, and deployment and distribution solutions.

I’m in a packed session on producing a school news broadcast. Educators from Barksdale Elementary in Conyers, Georgia (Anne Davis’ stomping grounds!!) are showing a typical program right now. They didn’t fix every glitch; it’s cute as anything.

I want to find out what their production methods and equipment are, about the amount and kind of support they needed from admin and parents, and ongoing issues they didn’t expect when they set it up. These folks are local, and I definitely want to hook up with them.——-

A nice circular title there….

The weblog workshop included a New! Free! Weblog! It’s hosted by TeacherHosting.com, and uses Movable Type, so numerous blogging tools will work with it. Take a look at my new one, and if you need a blog host, consider TeacherHosting.——-

If you’re interested in blogging in education, Edweblogs.org is a blog about the ISTE NECC conference in New Orleans. Take a look. And if you’re in New Orleans, I hope to see you there!——-

Spent today walking around the French Quarter and eating eating well. Much to post about today, the workshop yesterday (very good, many notes), and Mike Hoffman, who I ran into at the conference reception tonight. I complimented him on the Canon XL-1 camera he was carrying. He’s got the job of making video about the conference and having a 10-minute looping DVD ready for Tuesday night. He’ll be lucky to sleep much at all before then. We got to talking, and I mentioned this site. Turns out he reads it already! Thanks, Mike, and good luck with your video. Thanks as well to everyone else who reads this.——-

George Cook of Apple posted to the QTSS list that IMA uses a lot of bandwidth. I’d been using it in some tests and didn’t realize it might cause problems. He didn’t suggest an alternative, though. Still digging.

P.S.: Here’s a link to follow up later when I’m online, from the sig of Kuniyoshi Murata: English-Japanese Interpreter, Macintosh Webcast Specialist. (S)he offered suggestions to someone looking for WMV streaming and playback on Red Hat Linux. [Update: I checked out the link, and it’s all in kanji. Oh well; I’ll keep looking for Kuniyoshi’s posts to the list.]

Very good workshop here at NECC. Steve is very knowledgeable and has lots of experience using web media, lots of examples to point to, and knows how to do it on both Mac and PC.

Here is his iMovie example page for educators, and here is another of his NECC workshops, Web Authoring with QuickTime.

I’ve learned a lot about setting things up for streaming, about how Apple’s MPEG-4 isn’t perfect but in many circumstances is more than good enough, and about how in some circumstances a lower frame rate can mean a larger file size (counterintuitive, but true). More about these in later posts.——-

This was posted to the DV-List. There are some off topic posts, but generally a very high signal-to-noise ratio, and worth subscribing to for nuggets like this. In response to the following query, “Eric from Oz” offered his suggestions.


Continue reading “Optimize DV Freeze Frames.”——-

This was posted to the DV-List. There are some off topic posts, but generally a very high signal-to-noise ratio, and worth subscribing to for nuggets like this. In response to the following query, “Eric from Oz” offered his suggestions.

At 09:50 PM 6/10/2004, you wrote:
>I just exported a picture after freeze framing it in FCP 3, then into photoshop for touching up. The picture is ok, but I wondered about anyone having any tips on how to make this process even better.

You’re going to hate this answer.
The following is what I usually do to stills-off-video, especially before printing:

In Photoshop:

1) if this is any movement in the still, I first go to Filters/Video/Deinterlace and do that;

2) I find its usually necessary to raise the gamma a little, especially for low light shots, and this is done (by eye) in Image/Adjustments/Curves, by taking hold of the middle of the line and curving it slightly to the left.

3) I add a bit of contrast, which “sharpens” the appearance of the image: Image/Adjustments/Brighten/Contrast, usually about 12 points.

4) I add a bit of saturation, Image/Adjustments/Hue/Saturation, possibly 10-27 points.

5) finally I go to Filters/Sharpen/Mask and sometimes use about: Amount = 100%; Radius = 2-4; and Threshold = 17-20.

Sometimes for a dark shot I will go to Filters/Noise/De-speckle if there is gain speckles in the dark areas.

All of this is gauged by eye.

The size needs to be altered to make true 4:3 for printing; Image/Image size; deselect proportional, then type in some 4:3 combo such as 24 and 18 or some such.

I wish there was a macro to do all this, but sometimes the shot doesn’t need it all doing.

Eric from Oz——-