DV for Teachers

ConsumerElectronics.net reports:

The age of Hi Def home movies for the average person has arrived. Barely a week after announcing a pair of new professional HD camcorders, Canon dropped the other shoe by unveiling the HV10, a palm-sized camcorder that shoots true 1080 HDV video.

There have been HD edit systems for over a year now, but not too many places to watch HD. With this inexpensive camera for making HD, it’s one less barrier to adoption of this new standard. I think it’s still too soon for most educators to consider switching to producing HD, though. How soon will you have HD-ready video monitors in your classrooms? Not too soon, I’d guess.

You’re working on a Windows Movie Maker project in a computer lab. You’ve gotten a lot done, but you need to save it to finish another day. How do you keep your project intact so you can finish on another computer?

The key is to remember that you need to save the Movie Maker project file and the captured .WMV video files, and keep them together in a single folder. The project file has a weird extension: .MSWMM (if you named your project BobVideo, it would look like this: BobVideo.MSWMM). This project file keeps track of your edits – which clips go in which order, when the music starts, what you cut out – but it only works by pointing to the video files you’ve captured. It doesn’t sort of absorb the video the way Word or PowerPoint do with picture files. You have to keep the video files and the project files in the same folder or they’ll lose each other.

There’s more – if you add music, or photos, they have to go in this same folder with the *.MSWMM project file and the .WMV files. See the complete how-to in this PDF: SetUpWindowsMovieMaker.pdf.

Howto: Create Your Own Podcasting Show On Windows [ ZefHemel.com ]

For our Windows friends.

Dave Nagel has a Motion tutorial with amusing potential: Creating Billowing Fabric in Apple Motion. Dave says:

Today we’re going to take a look at creating a billowing fabric effect in Apple’s Motion 2. Using a combination of filters, generators and even particles in Motion, it’s possible to create a pretty wide range of effects that add depth and movement to otherwise boring 2D objects. Case in point: a banner stretched across the crotch of the Arc de Triumph announcing that today is my birthday.

He’s got QuickTime movies to show the effect, too. Very nice.

Stopping Spotlight indexing

I had an issue with this; this is a bookmark so I can find it again later.

I’m showing Dr. Williams’ graduate assistant, the very smart Tonia, how this WordPress blogging thing works. Blogs are getting more and more traction here at the GSU College of Education, and they’ll only grow more and more.

“The Authentic Fake!” » Blog Archive » 10 tips for new Mac users, switching from Windows…

Helpful tips and a good discussion with more.

Hoosier Daddy? In Indiana Schools, It’s Linux describes a recent move to open-source operating systems for some school computers:

How’s this for back-to-school fashion: More than 20,000 Indiana students are now Linux-enabled under a state grant program to roll out low-cost, easy-to-manage workstations, which are running various flavors of the open-source operating system.

_“We have a million kids in the state of Indiana. If we were to pay $100 for software on each machine, each year, that’s $100 million for software. That’s well beyond our ability. That’s why open source is so attractive. We can cut those costs down to $5 [on each computer] per year.”_

John Virata reviews the Movavi VideoSuite, and it seems like a very flexible tool for basic editing and for converting files to many many different formats, including PSP, iPod, mobile phones, even QuickTime, Windows Media, MPEG, and Real. (Why would you want to put anything in Real format? But that’s another discussion.) I don’t know if it will rip encrypted DVDs; I doubt it, but wrote to Movavi and hope to find out.

SEOmoz Blog | 5 HTML elements you probably never use (but perhaps should)

I love short little focused guides like this. They’re useful and digestible – not too much at once.