DV for Teachers

Video Catching Up to Photos When It Comes to Sharing – New York Times

Why couldn’t someone just send video from a desktop or laptop computer to other people’s computers?

A good question the article seeks to answer, looking for options to YouTube or MetaCafe. They review services new to me: Pando, Pixpo, HomeMovie, and Snapfish. (Okay, I’d heard of Snapfish, but I didn’t know they did video sharing too.)

Some of them stream from your own hard drive, one will compress your tapes for you; there are several options. Check them out.

Eight Invaluable WordPress Plugins

WordPress is a great blogging tool, and these are good plugins, several I’ve yet to try. I do have Akismet on this blog, and it stops the comments spam with little involvement from me. I love it.

Mac OS X Hints posted Create time lapse movies in iMovie –

iMovie 6.0.2 seems to have a new time lapse feature built-in, something I hadn’t seen or heard of before. To find it, just click on the arrow next to the ‘switch to camera mode’ toggle, and select Time Lapse from the drop down menu. You have the option of setting how often a frame should be saved, and whether or not the date and time should be shown.

This feature would be useful for animators, nature videography, other science experiments, weather tracking, watching the kids, watching the teacher, watching the boss….

MacDevCenter points to Digital Inspiration’s nice overview of ways to use an iPod as a Voice Recorder or Video Camcorder. The site’s author, Amit Agarwal, names two devices I haven’t seen before; they’re interfaces for iPods that allow direct recording to an iPod’s hard drive. They sound clever and potentially very useful, but keep your VaporWare detectors handy.

One, the Catapult from Bella, will accept Firewire input from a DV or HDV camcorder and save to the iPod or any other drive with USB connectivity. The iPod or hard drive can than connect via USB to a computer for editing or other processing. I like that it’s not iPod only, too, and nowhere does it say that you can view the footage on the iPod. I’ll assume it does not; which means it’s a little less versatile than it would seem. It could a lot of pressure on products like the Focus FireStore, a line of Firewire hard drives meant to do the same thing. The FireStore and other similar devices have been shipping for some time, but with a starting price of $799 MSRP, the Catapult could provide more flexibility at a lower price point – assuming you can just add your own bus-powered USB drive. This is not explicitly claimed on the Bella web site, and so would need some testing. (Again, keep the VaporWare tester handy.) It’s designed to share a slip-case with the iPod or a 2.5-inch drive, has several functions for time-lapse and remote-trigger recording, and has an internal rechargeable battery and AC adapter. The Bella site claims it will ship later in 2006 for less than $300.

The other is the iSee from ATO, the video card people. It’s apparently shipping already, too. It functions with the iPod’s storage (older iPods only, not the iPod video!) as a portable media player rather than as an adjunct to video production. The iSee records via analog input, not Firewire, and the resulting video is viewable with the iSee’s screen, or the combined units can be connected to a TV for viewing. MSRP is $269. Lots of product shots at TigerDirect, here, and an unhappy buyer reviewed it at Amazon, though he didn’t check to see whether his 60gb iPod video would work; it doesn’t.

I’d sure like to have a chance to test these.

Macworld: Protect your Mac

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Your Mac is the safest personal computer on the market. Even though we’ve had a couple of scares this year, there are still almost no Mac viruses. According to research done by Sophos (a maker of antivirus software), at press time there were only four known OS X viruses, compared with roughly 80,000 on Windows.

But let’s face it—we live in a dangerous world, and not all of those dangers (especially those to your privacy) are platform-specific. Here’s how to keep your personal information out of the wrong hands—and keep your Mac out of trouble.

I am not a security expert, and Macworld, though authoritative, isn’t infallible. Nonetheless, from my experience, this looks like a good series of tips for keeping the data on your Mac safe from web nasties. Don’t forget: it’s the data that’s more important than which machine it’s on. Back up everything on a regular basis.

If you use Firefox (and what even half-informed person doesn’t?) then this Mozilla Firefox Cheat Sheet will come in handy.

Time ’s too limited to link directly to all the pieces here worth a look at Zoom In Online Spotlights, but go browse a bit: video tutorials for various audio and video apps, interviews with folks at all levels of film and video production and distribution from very indie individuals to corporate insiders with valuable info to share on workflows, strategies, and success stories. Better than most newsletters of its type.

John Udell thinks through User-generated content vs. reader-created context:

Everything about this buzzphrase annoys me. First, calling people “users” is pernicious. It distances and dehumanizes, and should be stricken from the IT vocabulary (see Those clueless users) as well as from the publishing vocabulary. IT has customers and clients, not users. IT-oriented publishers have readers, not users.

Second, “content” is a word that reminds me more of sausage than of storytelling (see Sausage, traffic, and clueless users). As writers and editors we don’t “generate” “content,” we tell stories that inform, educate, and entertain—or should.

He is exactly right. Though he’s writing for a tech industry audience, the ideas apply to education and indeed to anyone who reads or writes on the web. The term “user” is almost as bad as the word “consumer,” a corruption of the idea of a “customer.” You are no more a consumer or user of this site – which is text and pictures, thank you, not just “content” – than you are a consumer of books or newspapers or radio or television. You’re a reader, or a listener, or a viewer; you have a mind, and with the web, you can respond to what you read or listen to or view with more than a letter, or an email; you can publish a response or critique. That’s the small-d democratic innovation of the web. If your response – or indeed anything you publish here – is thoughtful enough and well enough presented, you can and will find an audience… who can respond the same way.

There are still far too many in the world who think about such exchanges of ideas incorrectly, and in one dimension: as content to be consumed. They’re wrong, and the more we publish on the web, the more likely they are to either change their minds or lose their influence.

Garage Band Tutorial

I’ve never done much with GarageBand, but these instructional videos should make it easy to get started.

20 Tips To Boost Your Photo IQ – PopPhoto – June 2006

From Popular Photography Online. If you’re going to print your photos, you might as well know what you’re doing. It can be expensive to make mistakes.