DV for Teachers

The Student Filmmakers site offers support for making student films (well, of course), including a group of articles on sound for film and video, discussion forums, and an extensive list of links to student- and indie-oriented resources. The authors and editors are, as writers, sometimes a little sloppy. The article on Format Confusion is pretty confused itself:

A good rule for sizing audio files is this. Every stereo minute of a 44.1 Khz 16bit AIFF or WAV runs approx 10 megabytes. This little info comes in extremely handy when working with others who are sending you data.

Think about it for a moment. Your short film runs 20 minutes and you prep an OMF file for your mixing guru who lives down the street. When you are done prepping, the OMF file is 800 kilobytes. Now do the extremely simple math. 20 minutes times 10 megabytes is, yes 200 megabytes. So now you know you’ve done something wrong with your OMF because your file has to be at least 200 megs! Of course if you have more than two tracks which you must if someone is speaking and there is some music in the background. Your file will exceed this 200 meg number.

The information is there, just not clearly explained for their audience. (For better examples, ee Larry Jordan’s tutorial for exporting OMF from Final Cut Pro, and Ben’ Bryant’s on sound when the videographer is also the sound tech, both at Ken Stone’s just excellent Final Cut Pro site.) I appreciate the Student Filmmaker site and its intentions, and you’ll find good information there, but don’t expect it to provide the most definitive lessons.

“So, is it safe yet? The answer is a qualified “maybe.”“

I’m still on 10.3.7. Happy to let other folks figure out the issues for me.——-

Lame. A really lame pair of articles, one claiming MM2 bests iMovie and vice versa, each with a few paragraphs per page stretched over five pages loaded with over-animated ad crap. Read them if you must, but they’re worth the bandwidth only to show your students several things: how not to design a web page, how not to write a comparative essay, how not to cite evidence in support of your argument. Just disappointing.——-

Valuable Ed-Tech discussion thread with good links for Royalty free video clips suitable for classroom use.——-

Macworld finds lots to like in the new Roxio Toast:

“While the new release looks similar to its predecessor, it features extensive changes under the hood, including support for the DivX video compression format, the ability to browse iLife content and many other changes.”

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Another good list of Windows freeware.

“We have now reached a point where the average Joe never has to buy a single extra piece of software outside of his operating system (and not even that if you don’t want to). Office applications, image editors, desktop search, antivirus – these are all available as completely free downloads that are often better than their commercial counterparts. Here’s a quick list of the best.”

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“With a single click PAGEot allows you to add QuickTime movies (interactive videos, sounds, panoramas and objects…) to your HTML pages. It gives to advanced users an immediate access to the complex features of QuickTime plug-ins, and gives you the power to create interactive playlists and presentations. With PAGEot, you can export fully functional HTML pages, or directly copy-paste HTML code in your preferred web page editor.”

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Nice tool for quickly checking the look of all your fonts. Very useful.——-

A free browser for Mac that builds extra features on Apple’s Safari browser.

“Shiira is a web browser based on Web Kit and written in Cocoa. The goal of the Shiira Project is to create a browser that is better and more useful than Safari. All source code used in this software is publicly available.”

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I just found this, via the online version of Macworld’s September Bonus CD. Looks good – some use PowerPoint or other tools as a prompter, but this has a better price….