DV for Teachers

I posted most of my notes about Saturday’s EduBloggerCon at NECC at my wikispaces wiki, and I’ll be coming back here to reflect and think through some of it. I’ve started a Ning network, too, and added lots of folks on Twitter.

Speaking of reflection, I was a little reluctant to come this year… I’ve felt a bit static in my work, that blogging more than an irregular pointer to a good multimedia link was too much effort, much less producing podcasts, reflecting here, finding opportunities for doing more teaching and presenting. I have let looking at my usual technology (and other) sites be much too much of my online life. There are many many other professionals like me out there, and now I see how social/educational networked sites can work; there’s more to it then “friending” someone.

I’ve met some good folks, folks I’ll connect with more, I’m sure. You can read about them at my Ning site.

I’m trying to set up Flock as my blogging tool from within NetNewsWire. I’ve set up my accounts, and this ought to just work. I tried it almost two years ago but didn’t find it should replace my default browser, Camino.

All computers have disk drives. All disk drives are machines. All machines will, eventually, break down. (It’s kind of a rule - moving parts, friction, heat, wear, entropy, etc.) Robert Palmer of The Unofficial Apple Weblog gives extremely valuable information on recovering data from a bad disk in What to do when a disk goes bad:

We’ve all been there. The external disk you bought three or four years ago, which has been working great so far, starts to click. And its not a good click … its the kind of click that gives you the spinning beach ball of death.

The post covers several eventualities and solutions with good explanations and links. A valuable resource if you have, you know, a computer. With a disk drive.

A quick link to a thorough piece on compressing for YouTube: How To Make YouTube Videos Look Great. The author covers several methods, platforms, and compressors, including Divx, Flash, and QuickTime, and provides links to samples. Very well done - if you want to learn about video compression for the web, whether for YouTube or some other site, you’ll do well to bookmark this.

Via Creative Cow’s newsletter, I learned of Shane Ross’s Ultimate FCP FAQ, Part 3. After scanning it, I realized this was a good list of tips that can really save time and aggravation.

“Part 3?” I said to myself… so I checked out Part 1 and Part 2. Well worth bookmarking if you use FCP. Among some pointers, Shane tells you how to save your project so it can be opened in an earlier version of Final Cut, why capturing with iMovie doesn’t work well with Final Cut, tips for backing up your project once you’re done, and much more. That’s worth a bookmark right there.

Thanks, Shane.

Gain Adjust: Absolute vs Relative Audio In Final Cut Pro

A simple and beautiful tool for adjusting the volume of selected clips throughout an entire Final Cut project, without going through to do it by hand. Oh I could have used this many many times. Thanks to Digital Media Net for keeping the tips coming. Now if they’d just ease back on the incredible number of ads in Flash on their sites….

John Virata heaps praise on Pinnacle’s PC-based video editor. It’s been around a long time, and he really likes the app’s continued development. It can export Flash and 3GP from the timeline, and can also export direct to YouTube.

Pinnacle Studio 12 Ultimate is probably the most full featured entry level video editing solution on the market. It has the widest support for the new AVCHD and HDV camcorders, offers the widest range of output options, and includes three non-Pinnacle applications that are integrated nicely and are designed to make your video projects more unique.

The apparently tireless Miguel Guhlin offers a very useful tutorial showing a method for converting FLV to MOV using VLC Media Player. This means FLV-based media can be easily put on multimedia devices, like iPhones and iPods. Nice.

I’ve wanted a solid overview of how to run OS X and Windows together and Macworld has provided it with Best of Both Worlds: OS X and Windows I’m in the market for a good reference about it, too. This article is a good starting place.