DV for Teachers

“PDFLab lets you split and join PDF documents as well as insert images and blank pages. You will also be able to easily create PDF documents out of several images.”

This appears to be quite usable. And it’s free.——-

Free, PC Only. Looks good.——-

They’re going to teach ESOL soon, and they asked me about blogs.——-

Graeme Natress:

If there’s one topic more than any other in video production, especially in North America, that causes confusion, misinformation and probably more posts to more message boards than any other, it’s black levels in digital video.

In this article I will explain where the issues are with black levels in digital video, with specific regard to how Final Cut Pro handles and displays them. I’ll also look at how Final Cut Pro handles black and white levels in general, and what it does when importing or exporting still frames or images. Final Cut Pro has settings for “White” and “Super White” in the timeline and I’ll explain how they effect video and still image import / export.

One of the most annoying things about the technical aspects of video production is that everything changes when you cross international borders. Analogue video levels differ the world over, but fortunately, digital video levels are standard across the world. North America, in particular, differs from the rest of the world in how it handles black levels in analogue video, and it is this difference, the infamous 7.5 IRE setup that causes more confusion than anything else.

This is a thorough examination of the issue, with graphics and screenshots to explain how FCP users can understand and work through problems related to black levels.

By the way: I’m not a trained video engineer, so I cannot vouch for the absolute accuracy of everything Graeme covers. He and the sites for which he writes have very high credibility and a wide readership among industry professionals, however, so I plan to rely on this information. YMMV.——-

Audio Hijack Pro is a great, flexible recording application. The developers post a guide to using it for a podcast. Nice. Mac only.——-

This is a valuable thread with many links to books and curriculum guides, samples of student work, suggestions for specific projects such as recording student poems, music, and oral histories, research-based role-play interviews with historical figures, and school documentaries and newscasts. has more than 21 links and several book recommendations.

The EDTECH list is carefully moderated, and welcomes all technology skill levels, so the signal-to-noise ratio is very high. An RSS feed is available, so you don’t need to subscribe via email.——-

Barry Braverman:

Because DVD is the lifeblood of so many interconnected industries, it makes sense that we adjust our thinking to better accommodate the format’s unique requirements and idiosyncrasies. If you’re a shooter or perhaps a producer who shoots your own material, you need to understand the heart and soul of the DVD-Video format.

After all, we’re not outputting to tape anymore, and indeed, this Christmas will likely mark the unofficial end of VHS as we know it. Most of the major retail chains like Target and Wal-Mart have already announced plans to abandon the twenty-five year old format at the conclusion of this holiday season.

In order to achieve the highest quality DVD images, here are a few practical recommendations from a shooter’s perspective [...]

(I didn’t know the VHS format was doomed that soon. Someone should tell the schools.)

Good tips for those learning to shoot for DVD.——-

Shareware For Video And Motion Graphics

Competitive video pros ride the bleeding edge, constantly looking for that right tool to expand their tool boxes and capabilities. But that tool doesn’t have to cost you an arm and a leg, and you might not have heard about the precise tool you’re looking for.”

Several good apps noted here. If you don’t have a DV.com registration, use bugmenot.com for a login and password.——-

Until recently, high definition video production has been too expensive for mere mortals. Now, the HDV format has changed all that. But isn’t there still a lot of data being bandied about? How will the footage be edited? Apple’s newest version 5 of Final Cut Pro has a solution to this problem, where the object of the game is to keep the HDV signal as untouched as possible as it winds its way through the computer and then back out to tape. Here’s a close-up look at this native HDV editing process in Final Cut Pro 5.

Charlie White weighs in; a key excerpt:

Appleís technique lets you pass HDV footage into your computer untouched, and leaves it in its native state until you want to add an effect or a cut. For a cut, it only needs to add an extra I-frame around that cut, and rendering that small amount of data doesnít take nearly as long as it would if you had to render the entire clip.

So there’s a need to render, just like the early days of DV, but only the new I-frames. This is a reasonable sacrifice, Charlie says, to get the HDV increase in image quality, as it keeps speed up and file size and need for rendering down. Overall, it’s a positive review, but note the test machine is a dual 2.5-GHz G5 with 4 GB of memory.——-

“Mp4-tech, sponsored by the MPEG Industry Forum, is one of the multitude of mailing lists that I subscribe to (in digest mode whenever possible). Via a recent posting, I learned of a regularly-updated list of links to sources of MPEG-4 AVC (i.e. MPEG-4 Part 10, also known as. H.264) video encoders, decoders and codecs, (both hardware and software, the latter both closed- and open-source) which you can access here. Thanks to Dmitriy Vatolin, from the MSU Graphics & Media Lab in Moscow, for this service!”

From Brian’s Brain.——-