DV for Teachers

“Creative problem solving is a trait many creative professionals share, but perhaps no one possesses that skill more than Brian P. Lawler. See how he made a teleprompter with a laptop, Adobe InDesign, and some scrap wood. Ingenious.”

After reading this, I agree: it’s ingenious. You wouldn’t need InDesign to flip your text, though. Make a PDF of your text with Preview, and flip it in Hide Itoh’s completely excellent QuickImageCM or some other image viewer like Irfanview (for Windows), and there you go. This is a reall nice idea; a school could really make use of this, and an aging laptop could find a new lease on life as a teleprompter. I love this kind of do-it-yourself-ing.——-

MacNN pointed this morning to a free web gallery app – “Gallery Monger”, a name I really like – at Complete Digital Photography, a site I hadn’t seen before. I came away impressed, and have bookmarked it and put it in my RSS aggregator for regular return visits. Only some of the posts are Mac-centric; it’s mostly about putting digital photography in reach of everyone. Here’s the site’s ”/about” blurb:

Welcome to your one-stop digital photography guide, featuring reviews, how-tos, galleries, and more. If you like the site, be sure to check out the book Complete Digital Photography, which you just happen to be able to order by clicking on that link right over there.

Here’s part of the blurb about Gallery Monger:

To provide a lower-cost (read “free”) alternative to MediaPro, I wrote Gallery Monger, a stand-alone app that can turn folders of images (or selections from an iPhoto catalog) into a finished web gallery. Gallery Monger is template-based, so you can easily edit the existing templates or create your own. MediaPro still scores over Gallery Monger with its thorough support for EXIF metadata, so if you want to display image stats, Gallery Monger won’t be able to extract that information for you. For quickly creating a nice-looking gallery, though, this software may be just what you need. Gallery Monger requires Mac OS X version 10.3 or later.”

Yet another reason to love the web, and how it lets so many people share their skills, knowledge, and passion.

Digital Video Workshops, based in San Francisco, offers a very good monthly e-newsletter. Though they’re a Mac-based shop specializing in Final Cut Pro training, their newsletters offer platform-independent advice on topics of particular usefulness to video students and instructors. Recent topics:

• August: Tips on Conducting the Documentary Interview – From interview techniques to lighting and sound
• October: Organizing Your Raw Documentary Footage – Making sense of a pile of DV tapes
• November: The Five Elements of Documentary – Creating a richer documentary experience

Definitely worth your time.——-

The very sharp CreativeBits blog – oriented more to Photoshop and design folks – offers a tip useful for anyone using Photoshop for video graphics: If you enable the Allow Non-Linear History option (from the History Options in the History palette menu), you can select a state, make a change to the image, and the change will be appended to the bottom of the History palette (instead of replacing all the states below the active state). You can even delete a state without losing any of the states below it!

Eesh, there are just so many cool features in Photoshop… there are always more to learn.——-

“For anyone who does high quality video compression for the internet, having a fully adjustable encoder is very important. No two source clips are the same, and to create the best looking and sounding output means being able to tweak all aspects of the encoding process. You would be hard pressed to find a more adjustable video compression application than Compression Master 3.”

Via Ken Stone – lots of praise for this new compression utility.——-

It’s a new year by the calendar, and a new semester shortly. All the best to each of you, for resolutions, fresh starts, and new ideas.

Onward, through the fog! Thanks to Gilbert Shelton.——-