DV for Teachers

From Lifehacker’s Alpha Geek posts, a good tutorial to Make Microsoft Word less annoying.

Microsoft Word can drive you nuts. It piles on features few people need, plagues you with annoying auto-corrections and just generally acts like a pain in the ***.

Post author Rick Broida includes screenshots with his tips for streamlining the toolbars, activating and deactivating automatic functions, and information about two free, high quality alternatives to Word that will nonetheless read, edit and save Word format documents. How about that?

See my earlier post on Taming Microsoft Word.

Apple has released an update to QuickTime and as usual the fine folks at Macintouch are keeping us informed about issues, gotchas, and tips.

Oh, this has nice effects. too busy to throuw in an image, but if you have OS X, this offers a cool pixellated effect from the earliest days of the Mac, and could be useful in other ways than nostalgia.

Tinrocket, LLC | HyperDither
HyperDither is an OS X image processing utility that converts color or grayscale images to 1 bit black & white using a sophisticated dithering routine. Specifically, HyperDither implements the Atkinson dithering filter.

A great article and podcast if you’re interested at all in making good music easily for your videos, or you want to know more about a successful commercial composer. His language gets a bit salty, so be advised if you’re referring students, but it’s very worth while.

O’Reilly—Digital Media Insider Podcast 8: A Theme Come True
In this episode of Digital Media Insider, we ask Emmy Award-winning composer BJ Leiderman, the melodic mastermind behind NPR’s Morning Edition, and PRI’s Marketplace. We’ll also digitally deconstruct an original theme song to see how it works.

The Blank Canvas:

So, you’ve be editing for a while, you’re good and solid on the FCP interface and feel at home with transitions, filters and text. But now you want to go another step. You want to more complexity. You want more interest. You want more depth. In short, you want to move into compositing.

Learn several techniques to improve the section transitions in your video. I’m working on one now, and I’ll use this as a template. This is very well timed for me. Yessssss.

It’s a Peachpit morning. “Cream of the Crop: cropping and resizing”:
http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.asp?p=420909&seqNum=1&rl=1 is chapter from The Adobe Photoshop CS Book for Digital Photographers, from 2005. Scott is a Photoshop whiz/guru/master/sensei.

If a chapter on cropping and resizing doesn’t sound exciting, really, what does? It’s sad, but a good portion of our lives is spent doing just that—cropping and resizing. Why is that? It’s because nothing, and I mean nothing, is ever the right size.

Quick Links today, as there’s lots to do offline:

Maria Langer offers Publish a Video Podcast with WordPress, from PeachPit, publishers of good technology guides.

I wanted to publish my video podcast from my existing blog-based Flying M Air web site, which was created with WordPress 2. It took me a few hours to figure it all out, but it was worth it. I’m very happy with the results. This article explains how I did it, so you don’t have to go through a research and trial-and-error process like I did.

Go ye and ‘cast.