DV for Teachers

“Thanks to the wonders of podcasting, you no longer have to become a media mogul to be heard far and wide. With some basic equipment and our Podcasting guide, you can simply record broadcasts on your Mac and publish them to the Internet for others to download.”

It doesn’t have to be a podcast; it could be the soundtrack to your video, or your school’s newscast. Just a good tutorial for audio edit and polish. As these free tools gain ever more traction, more independents and students can produce really good sounding work.——-

“Express Scribe is professional audio player software designed to assist the transcription of audio recordings. It is installed on the typist’s computer and controlled using the keyboard (with ‘hot’ keys) and/or foot pedal controls. This computer transcriber application features variable speed wave playback, foot pedal operation, file management and more. This program is free.”

Good grief. All product websites should give such a clear and concise description of what their products do and how much they cost. Kudos for the website; now to try the software.

[Update] I downloaded and installed the Mac OS X version of the software, and it wouldn’t recognize any of the AIFF or MP3 files I threw at it. I went to their discussion forum, and another user suggested locating the desired file in Finder, ctrl-clicking (or right clicking, if you have a two-button mouse), choose, Open With… and then choose Express Scribe. That worked for an MP3 file and AIFF. I realize this is free software, but thus far it fails to do what the website claims. I’ve written their support folks; we’ll see what they say. So, YMMV. BTW, the Windows version supports many many more formats than Mac OS X. ——-

Larry Jordan is a much-linked FCP guru and instructor, whose articles show up at Ken Stone and elsewhere. Go and check out his latest FCP Newsletter; he doesn’t leave them up indefinitely, so go soon. Clear evaluations of new features, problems, and workarounds from readers around the world, and advice I plan to follow on when and how to upgradet to Tiger, FCP 5, and QT 7.——-

Apple’s current recipe for streaming video from camera through a laptop to a streaming server, complete with PDF “Cookbook” downloads.——-

Apple Knowledge Base: QuickTime Pro 6 and 7 FAQ

“Will my QuickTime 6 Pro key work with QuickTime 7? I want to use my QuickTime 6 Pro key, but I’ve installed QuickTime 7. What do I do? Will a QuickTime Pro key for Windows work on a Mac, and vice versa? Is QuickTime 6.x supported with Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger?”

Valuable information for making the transition from QT 6 to 7, from Panther to Tiger, from everything to H.264 as a codec, and so on.——-

... “while the Mac OS opens up a world of elegant interface design and commercial software unseen on the Linux desktop, lacking out of the box is the plethora of open source software to which we are so accustomed. Luckily, a growing community of open source developers and advocates has been working since the birth of the platform to bring free software to Mac OS X.”

If you’re at all techie, please consider open source – do yourself and your budget a favor.——-

Following up the previous post about torrent files:

“Beginning to use BitTorrent to download files can be relatively intimidating to the average computer user. Since we use torrents extensively on CommonBits, we decided to put together this how to guide for getting started.”

Via LifeHacker.——-

Another Oh My moment today, via BoingBoing:

“Broadcast Machine is software for your website that can publish fullscreen video files to thousands, using torrent technology to reduce or eliminate bandwidth costs. It is free, open source, and designed for easy installation. Broadcast Machine features an intuitive interface, integrated torrent creation, and flexible channel management. It creates a browsable archive of videos on your website, but its real purpose is to be the perfect publishing tool for our video player that comes out in June. Broadcast Machine creates channels that, viewed in the player, give people a TV-like experience.”

Could be an excellent way, provided your network’s ports allow torrents, to distribute educational video.——-

Stephen Schleicher: One of the best new features in Final Cut Pro 5 is multicam editing. This handy feature allows those do multiple camera productions to gang the clips together to make editing a breeze. In this Final Cut Pro Quick Tip, we’ll quickly look at how it works.

I haven’t gotten the upgrade yet, and I have about five hours of three-camera programming to edit… Oh, baby, this is going to be good.——-

Mike Curtis: Beware – there are THREE possible upgrades for Final Cut Pro users!

[...] you have to be VERY specific when asking about what you want. I asked for a “Final Cut Studio upgrade” which is imprecise and vague – I SHOULD have asked for “Final Cut Studio upgrade from Production Suite.” to be explicitly clear about what it was I needed.

Oh my. I hope I was clear enough, and that my manager was clear enough when she ordered it… I heard her wrangling through the Apple Store for Education’s insanely complex hoop-jumping on the phone, and don’t wish to revisit that upon her. Oh please oh please. Thanks again to Mike Curtis for posting this kind of obscure yet necessary information, and SHAME on Apple for making this kind of thing too flipping hard to do easily.——-