DV for Teachers

Video distribution keeps changing:

“Watch
Veoh Using Veoh’s free software, you can watch Full-Screen Internet Television, with access to shows that you could never find on traditional television networks. No matter what your interest or taste, chances are that you will find what you’re looking for on Veoh. Give it a try, it’s completely free.

Broadcast
Want to create your own TV show, or a whole TV channel? Veoh allows you to broadcast Full-Screen television shows to the world, free of charge, even if you get millions of viewers. Start broadcasting today, it’s free and easy.”

But with the legality of P2P facing serious challenge due to “piracy,” can this kind of distribution network succeed for independents?——-

Another tool for working with VCD/MPEG-1 files; apparently, it offers functions similar to Roxio Toast but as a beta, it’s donation-ware. Hmm. As with many freeware finds, I haven’t had a chance to test this one.

“What is FireStarter FX?

FireStarter is a pure Cocoa, Mac OS X only burning application which will allow you to duplicate all kind of CDs (even those that other Mac OS X applications won’t), burn VCDs and SVCDs, and have access to unique features such as overburning and CDDB access.

It’s also a very easy way of burning disc images from the PC world: It handles perfectly well cue/bin files, which are so common on Windows, and which were very hard to burn with other tools.

Plus, it’s a very easy way to erase an RW media, without the hassle of Disk Utility.

FireStarter FX is: 100% pure Cocoa – Intuitive and easy to use – Cool metal interface – Backup made easy – Completes Toast – cue/bin burning – VCD/SVCD burning – Overburning

What FireStarter FX is not:

FireStarter FX is not a tool to back up DVD-Videos, nor a transcoding tool to encode your videos in other formats such as MPEG4, MPEG2, MPEG1 or DivX (yet? ;-))”

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I came across a set of free tools I’ve started fiddling with for compressing to MPEG-1 and MPEG-2. I have tested it mostly for MPEG-1, though, since MPEGs generally play well on any platform, just about all players, and as so many of my users want, plays “right on the slide” in PowerPoint on PCs. It’s a shame, though, that none of the native media players will play VCD-formatted discs in my tests. Windows Media Player and QuickTime both got very confused. The MPEG-1 files will play fine, but if they’re in VCD format (which means the actual file has a .DAT) extension, they just start coughing.

One of the apps, MissingMpegEdit, purportedly allows editing of MPEG files and export to .mov, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and more. The main app, MMT-EZ, has a rough interface though, and as it works a series of Terminal windows opens; thus it may intimidate casual users a bit. Note that none of these apps will rip an encrypted DVD – strictly for unencrypted conversions, like that really good DVD you made, and then someone misplaced the source DV tapes….——-

I went to 2-pop for the first time in a while. They had a video clip on the front page from Digital Media Training demonstrating some of the features of FCP’s multicam editing capability. I then went to the DMTS home page, and found links to several of their training DVDs, with sample clips from many of them. They look great – and they have a different clip about multicam there. Go look at them all, if you want a better leg up on FCPs newest features.

“The award-winning Digital Media Training Seriesô presents the Inside Final Cut Studio training bundle. It includes 7 DVDs – Inside Final Cut Pro 5, Inside Motion 2, Inside DVD Studio Pro 4 and Inside Soundtrack Pro.”

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I have some video projects due in the winter, and I want titles and animations to look good, so here’s one of my first Motion posts:

“Replicators in Motion 2.0 are designed to help you create complex animations quickly. They can be used simply to create repeating effects -such as video tiles and kaleidoscopic effects -or to combine simple geometric objects into complex, fluid imagery for use as backgrounds or for other purposes. In this first installment in our new tutorial series on Motion replicators, we’ll explore the creation of complex objects from simple shapes and also cover some of the basics of creating and manipulating replicators.”

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From the press release, and note the product isn’t released yet, but it looks like a Darn Good Idea:

“Portable recording specialist HHB Communications has developed the FlashMic DRM85 – the world’s first professional Digital Recording Microphone. Perfect for all voice recording applications, in particular broadcast and press interviewing, the FlashMic combines a high quality Sennheiser omni-directional condenser capsule with 1GB of flash recording memory to create a convenient, durable and portable recording device that’s extremely easy to operate.”

Solid state (“flash”) storage continues to increase in capacity while decreasing in price and physical size – so we’ll see fewer wires for video and radio journalists; the only thing lacking is a way to monitor the recording as it’s made. This will definitely not be the only product of its type. Via Macintouch.

VideoCD (or VCD) uses a particular form of MPEG1 compression, and is very common in Asia (more info on the VCD format here). A professor needs portions of a VideoCD converted to something playable in Windows Media Player, which is the only computer video format supported at a conference she is to attend in Brussels in a few weeks. The video plays, but no sound, in Media Player. This prof came to GSU from Hong Kong, and still uses the PAL format DV camcorder she bought there for her classes. One of her videos had been converted to this VCD, and the disc was the only source for the clips she needed because she no longer knows right where to put her hands on the original tapes.

MPEG Streamclip to the rescue – it allowed me to select a segment of the video and export it to AVI. I took it to one of our lab machines and it played in Windows Media Player like it belonged there. After some false starts, due to some errors near the beginning or ending of the file, I then ripped the whole video to AVI, so she could have the entire video.

I could have converted it to any QuickTime format, including DV, to edit in iMovie. It’s a great app.

Note that MPEG Streamclip will not convert encrypted DVDs.

Quick Noise Removal Technique:

Noise Reduction – Step by Step

Step 1:First open an image that has a lot of noise in Photoshop. Images with a lot of noise will look speckled with red, green and sometime blue dots. Other times noise will take other forms, but digital noise almost always comes from shooting a picture in a digital camera while using a high ISO or film speed.

Oh, this is a good find. I have many high-speed photos I had to shoot at a high ISO with lots of noise.——-

I’m getting ready for my workshop – only a few signed up for this one, but it is early in the semester. In a totally unrelated topic area, the iPod nano makes me think about design, advertising, mass communication…. It is a sweet looking little machine. The combination of interface, hardware design, size, weight, and the compelling ad campaign – we see before us the power of mass communication and technology to shape our appetites.——-

D.W. Leitner follows up on his previous article:

“My last column, ” Are DVDs Archival?”, seems to have struck a chord with readers, for it prompted a number of e-mail responses.”

I posted here about Leitner’s first installment of the series.——-