Zoom In has a bunch of video tutorials, I’ve just discovered. This page links to a series on creating a soundtrack for video in Soundtrack and another two-part series on creating a podcast with Garageband. They have series on Motion, Dreamweaver, Adobe Illustrator, Flash, and much more. Well worth your time to check out.
Josh Catone at the Read/Write Web gives us Filmmaker’s Tool Kit: Creating a Movie with Web 2.0
there’s more to being Kubrick than editing. You have to write your film, cast it, shoot it, edit it, and distribute it to the masses. Web 2.0 applications and services can help with (nearly) all of these phases.The tool kit below will help you take your idea from start to finish and fulfill your dream of winning an Oscar (okay, maybe not, but you have to start somewhere). This is film making on a budget.
On Digital Producer, the very busy Heath McKnight offers his tips for converting a variety of kinds of footage to 24p, and raves about Apple’s color correction application Color, bundled in Final Cut Studio.
Jefferson Graham covers four editing applications that work with hard-drive based AVCHD video in Video editing choices blossom into nicely workable options
If you have one of those new high-definition camcorders that records directly to a hard drive, you’ve surely been frustrated.Editing high-def clips into your own personal mini-masterpiece has been nearly impossible. The video footage has not been compatible with popular consumer video-editing programs, nor could it be used on most Apple (AAPL) computers.
That’s now changed. Apple just rejiggered its popular iMovie program to accept video from these camcorders. And longtime Windows (MSFT) software favorites Pinnacle, Sony Vegas (SNE) and Ulead VideoStudio (CREL) have been upgraded as well.
Be sure to check his pros and cons list for each of the editors. Among the limitations: Sony’s app Vegas only works with Sony’s HD cameras; Corel’s Ulead Video Studio only works with video from the camera, so older already-captured clips won’t work; Pinnacle’s (and likely all the others) need a powerful machine to process the large and complex HiDef files; and the new iMovie is a very different animal from any previous version.
HD for the rest of us is here, but it seems it still has a ways to go before “it just works.”
GarageBand ‘08: A Review for Podcasters – O’Reilly Digital Media Blog
GarageBand ‘08 (or GarageBand 4, whichever name you want to call it) includes many time-saving and headache-saving improvements over the previous version. It also includes some new features that – if used properly – will improve the overall sound and quality of your podcast. For a heavy GarageBand user, I see these improvements as nearly worth the $80 pricetag for the iLife suite. Of course, iLife includes iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and iWeb in addition to GarageBand, so the purchase should be a no-brainer for the Mac-based podcaster.
Sounds good to me. It’s way past time for me to start podcasting – there are so many things around the ITC that need video tutorials, and there are bound to be people who need that information too. Keep an eye out, because they’re coming.
From the Microsoft site:
Microsoft Office Open XML File Format Converter for Mac:
With the Office Open XML Converter, you can convert Office Open XML files to a format that is compatible with Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac and Microsoft Office v. X for Mac. You can choose to convert and open one file, or convert a large number of files.This version of the converter improves conversion of Word documents that contain XML content, inline graphics, hyperlinked graphics, WMF/EMF graphics, SmartArt graphics, tracked changes in the document header and footer, Unicode characters, and Japanese Rubi fields. In addition, this version succeeds when converting Word documents that contain bibliography fields, citation fields, and complex tables.
This version of the converter can convert the following Office Open XML file formats:
- Word Document (*.docx)
- Word Macro-Enabled Document (*.docm)
- PowerPoint Presentation (*.pptx)
- PowerPoint Show (*.ppsx)
- PowerPoint Template (*.potx)
Get it before you need it, and need it you will.
A first tutorial for the new Microsoft Office: How to insert Flash into PowerPoint 2007.
Had to throw this link up quickly, sorry, no graphic. This CNET article tells us how important student-generated material could become, and several universities will incorporate it into their curricula this fall.
Knauff said self-publishing tools are an enticing way to get college students to develop original thoughts as opposed to simply repeating what they think professors want to hear. Students are collectively creating glossaries and repositories for academic articles, audio files and videos.“They write for their peers as well and it creates a different motivation. They want to do well, don’t want to look phony and get excited about the projects with the media aspect,” said Knauff.
The multimedia or personal stuff that professors may think of as flashy filler is getting students to make an emotional investment in their education. “Sure, the content they offer is not as good as if a faculty member produced it. The content expert is always going to be better at creating the content, but that’s not the point,” said Knauff.
And it goes beyond blogs replacing reading journals for undergrad American lit classes. Dartmouth’s medical school students use wikis to author, share and critique case studies.
The newsletter from eSchool News pointed this morning to The Futures Channel, which says their “Movies and Activities Deliver Hands-On, Real World Math and Science Lessons To Your Classroom.”
To produce and distribute high quality multimedia content which educators in any setting can use to enliven curriculum, engage students and otherwise enhance the learning experience.To connect mathematics, science, technology and engineering to the real world of careers and achievement, so that students can envision a context and purpose for what they are learning allowing them to envision their own successful futures.
To provide a channel through which professionals from the sciences, engineering and technology sectors can reach their future workforce prospects and interest them in their fields.
I scanned a couple of their videos, and they have great production values. I’d suggest giving this site and its videos a close look; you may find them very helpful.
I’ve used Mac laptops since 2003, and I wish I’d blogged this when I first heard about it not long after. I’ve never liked the default wake-up behavior of PowerBooks, iBooks, and now MacBooks: once the lid opens, the machine wakes up automatically. Not good. At several Mac news and forum sites, users complain about sleeping laptops waking up while their owners carry them around, and batteries drain or hard drives crash. All in all, a poor default setting.
So, try a little Unix to set things right. To set your Apple laptop to wake up only after a keyboard press, mouse click, or USB peripheral gets plugged in, open a Terminal window and type in this:
sudo pmset -a lidwake 0
You’ll like the change. You can read details about this, and the pmset command in general, at this Macworld hint, or do a search for sudo pmset lidwake.