DV for Teachers

“Mac developers keep on pumping out cool programs that don’t cost a mint—some are even free! For the third year in a row, we’ve rounded up the best of these software bargains.”


MacWorld once again rounds up some good-to-great software deals. I love this kind of stuff – tweaking my computer so it does what I want when I want to. But I also love finding out what other people figure out, things I never would imagine, much less want to do.

Here’s one, not from the MacWorld article (don’t remember where I came across this): QuickImageCM, a contextual menu plugin. Right-click on one or more image files in the Finder (control-click for the one-button mice holdouts) and in the popup contextual menu, choose View Image…

... and QuickImage lets you view, rotate, crop, change levels, export, and further edit, all while still in the finder. I use this freeware all the time – a nice gift from its developer, Pixture Studios. I remembered where I learned about this, too – one of Derrick Story’s posts at MacDevCenter.

GE’s Imagination at Work has a fascinating online sketchpad. Go draw a doodle and see what you think. I was tempted to use the send option, but I didn’t want to put two more emails in their database.

Here’s a screenshot:

A good, basic introduction to a wide variety of multimedia production procedures, from planning to post to distribution, all in one site, by educators. One of several possible starting points for the new video journalist or filmmaker.——-

“The British Broadcasting Corp. has announced an open-source video compression project that it hopes could one day give Windows Media Player a run for its money.

[...]The codec, called Dirac-after physicist Paul Dirac-is still in the early stages of testing. But developers say when it goes into beta in the fall of 2005, there’s a good chance it will be as good, if not better, than anything else out there.

”[...] The technologies used are suitable for everything, he said, from low-resolution mobile phone screens to high-definition television and even cinema. “You could use it for desktop video production, you could use it for streaming, or you could use it for movies—anyplace where you need compression.”

[This sounds really good!]

To protect the software and the techniques used to develop it, the BBC has taken out its own defensive patents, Davies said, and it is releasing the software under the Mozilla license to ensure “that those patents are licensed for free, irrevocably, forever.”

[Yes!!!]

The terms of the license mean that Dirac could be used in open-source software or in proprietary software in such a way that a company that produces the software would not have to divulge its source code, according to Davies.

[Hrmmmmm…]
——-

A student named Ingrid came in with a 188 MB MPG file she needed to compress to fit on her 20 MB student web space.

“Great!” I think. “I can finally try MPEG Streamclip,” which converts MPEG to QuickTime. No go. Couldn’t recognize the file type – it wanted an MPEG-2 VOB file, and this was a single muxed MPEG, likely an MPEG-1.

While looking for other options, I found again a link to the 3ivx MPEG-4 encoders, which they claim work really well with QuickTime:

“3ivx D4 4.5, based on the latest MPEG-4 specifications, is the most advanced QuickTime compatible MPEG-4 video compression technology for Mac OS and Windows. The D4 4.5 release delivers high quality encoding and decoding facilities inside all QuickTime compatible applications.”

Tests to follow at some point….

[Yow. Just realized this makes 5 posts today. Working that blogging muscle.]——-

Ivan at CreativBits: “Photoshop Actions are a designer’s secret weapon. Actions can make your life much easier. Actions are your friend!

This isn’t a tip, a trick or a hint. I’m not going to go into how to create your own actions – something that would take far too much space on this page. Instead, I’ll simply point you to a site that has several INCREDIBLE actions pre-built and ready for you to use.”

Well, I’ve never played with actions in Photoshop, but this looks like an easy way to make a consistent set of graphics for a single video: script all the different titles with a consistent type faces and drop the resulting Photoshop files on the timeline of your editor and go. Nice idea. CreativeBits has had several good posts over the late summer and fall. Go browse the archives.——-

Jan Ozer: “The days of endless bullet-point slides in PowerPoint are numbered-or they should be. Adding digital video to your PowerPoint presentation can help you produce a more instructive and compelling show.”

He’s right. In the article, however, Jan emphasizes larger resolutions of 640×480 for the finished product. They may look nice, but for many of our students and professors, moving presentations and video files from one machine to another from offices to laptop, from lab machine to instructor workstation – smaller resolutions like 320×240 look fine and have much more manageable file sizes.

“This week’s How-To is a three part special complete with our first Engadget “Podcast” MP3. The first part is how to get “Podcasts” on your iPod. So what’s a Podcast? To put it simply, a Podcast is an audio file, a MP3, most likely, in talk show format, along with a way to subscribe to the show and have it automatically delivered to your iPod when you plug in to iTunes. The show isn’t live, so you can listen to it whenever you want.”

Profs podcasting their lectures… students podcasting recordings of lectures, with commentary… podcasting your party mix from the night before… podcasting a foreign language lesson… podcasting a tutorial on almost anything. Podcasting just might catch on.——-

“I have my cable TV running through an old VCR, which is connected to my Mac using my mini DV camera as a bridge. I wanted to record some of my favorite shows onto DVD without commercials. After trying GCam and QuickTime Broadcaster, I decided I preferred the quality I got using iMovie the best. On the plus side, it’s a breeze to cut out commercials, make chapters and create an iDVD project.”

I always admire this kind of grass-roots jury-rigging!——-

Anand Li Shimpi: “What you are about to read are my impressions, as a devout PC user, of the Apple way of life.”

If you’re a PC person and curious about going Mac, this article presents a detailed look, with preferences and biases acknowledged throughout, and a good assessment. I use Macs of course in our labs and on my desk almost all the time, but most of our machines and users are PC, and Anand’s comments have helped me understand the PC perspective in ways that can help folks move back and forth with more ease. Useful and enlightening. Via MyAppleMenu.——-