DV for Teachers

On his O’Reilly Digital Media Blog, David Battino offers a story about a video for his kids that’s a whirlwind tour of several editing tips and tricks in QuickTime Pro.

My housebound sons and a 12-year-old friend borrowed my digicam, set it to video mode, and improvised a spy movie. Not realizing they’d shot upwards of 25 clips, I offered to stitch the scenes together in QuickTime Pro (QTP), which I thought would be simpler and faster than iMovie.

Note that these are video clips from a digital still camera – not DV clips from a camcorder. iMovie won’t edit anything but DV or HD, and Windows Movie Maker won’t play with many flavors of video from digicams either. QuickTime, especially with options like Flip4Mac and Perian, let you edit almost any type of (non-Flash) video. What David demonstrates here with his soundtrack tricks shows how QT Pro may be the most underappreciated video and audio editor out there. Unfortunately, that’s due to its underdocumentation – and I appreciate David’s efforts here to document what he discovered while working on this.

While looking for information about DV Expo (will they offer one on the east coast next spring or summer? Don’t know yet), I discovered EventDV, “The Event Videographer’s Resource.” On the Table of Contents page for the current (July 2008) issue, right at the top, is this tutorial: Cut Lines: Using Apple Keynote as a Motion Graphics Tool.

In this installment of Cut Lines, we’ll look at a growing trend among Final Cut users: utilizing Keynote as a quick-and-easy motion graphics tool. Everything you can do with graphics in Keynote can also be done in LiveType or Motion or directly in Final Cut Pro, and those larger apps can do much more than Keynote. The value in Keynote is that what it can do is really cool, really fast, and really easy. I’ve found I can do some graphical elements in Keynote faster and easier than I can in any of the Final Cut Studio (FCS) apps. Even with its limited abilities in this area, it’s still a valued part of my video graphics arsenal.

This is a really good idea! An easy video editor, really, if for making how-to tutorials to post on the web, too – this gets me thinkin’. Thanks to Ben Balser and EventDV for the tutorial.

I can schedule my posts to publish sometime in the future? Eesh. I should have understood this so long ago. Old dog, new tricks. [Sigh.]

When I come across a rich trove of blog-worthy items, I don’t always want to post them all at once. The problem is they often get lost in my “Blog This” folder in my browser bookmarks. With the best will in the world, I don’t always go back and find those links as I should, nor do I remember to go into my Wordpress Drafts page to update and publish. (I have 245 unpublished drafts right now!!)

I have seen the light, however. For the last week, I write up two or three posts at a time, and schedule their publication so they go up one or two a day. Keeps things fresh around here. The Wordpress FAQ gives a very clear explanation called Can I schedule a post?. I wrote this Monday just before lunch, and I’m scheduling it to publish Wednesday morning. Oh I love the web.

[Update: fixed typo and bad Textile formatting]

A friend sent a link to Online University Reviews: The Top 100 Liberal Arts Professor Blogs. A few of these I know and like; there are a few I’m surprised not to find here. Posting this so as not to forget it.

The fine coders at the VideoLAN project have updated their fine media player and encoder. Did you know that VLC, the VideoLAN client, can do all of this? From the VLC site:

• It is a free cross-platform media player
• It supports a large number of multimedia formats, without the need for additional codecs

• It can also be used as a streaming server, with extended features (video on demand, on the fly transcoding, ...)

  Add it to your video toolbox now – it’s safe and immensely useful for playing and transcoding odd video files. Download now for Mac, Windows, or Linux.

The MooHeads at Creative Cow offer Vee You: 8 Free Mac Plug-ins for FCP, AE and Motion, some very nice freebies that provide old and new style VU metering animations for Final Cut Pro and Express, After Effects, and Motion:

VFX artist Roger Bolton has worked on films including The Lord of the Rings, Charlie & The Chocolate Factory and Kingdom of Heaven. He has also created effects for his own use—in this case, a wide variety of 2D and 3D VU meters, automatically animated by the audio in your project. He now offers these 8 plug-ins to artists using Final Cut Pro, After Effects and Motion—with no watermarks, no time limits, no pricetag. Please note: These plug-ins are Mac-only.

You’ll want to watch the video tutorial and likely save it for future reference. The procedures shown take a lot of clicks to implement, but if your video needs this, it could add a lot to it. And hey, they’re free! They’re provided by CoreMelt, Roger Bolton’s unique operation to distribute his work. Lovely to have such a generous community.

More free plugins after the jump!

At O’Reilly’s Digital Media blog, Todd Ogasawara offers A Newbie Looks at Podcasting Tools: Garageband, Audacity, and Levelator. It’s a good overview of mostly Mac-based tools, and includeds a link to and description of the (apparently invaluable) Levelator. I haven’t tested it yet, but many many podcasters are singing – or blogging – its praises.

Todd publishes periodic posts on the O’Reilly blog about FFOSS – Freeware/Free and Open Source Software. Put that link in your RSS reader – worth it!

Need some guidance regarding copyright and online video? It was a topic of concern to many at NECC this year.

At American University’s Center for Social Media, take a look at their Online Video Resources guide to Fair Use and Online Video. The site goes deeply into the issues, and makes a solid resource for teachers and higher ed faculty looking for help with this thorny and evolving issue.

From NCSU’s Bethany Smith, via Twitter. Thanks, Bethany!

“Holy crap that’s a lot of tutorials!”

15 Awesome Tutorial Websites You Probably Don’t Know About

Just a quick post to this; found via the del.icio.us feed at PopUrls.

At Studio Daily, Lonzell Watson provides his concise method to Remove Unwanted Noise from Clips in Apple Soundtrack Pro 2. No audio samples, but a clear step-by-step with screenshots aplenty. If you don’t know this trick, you should. Ever have to work with an audio track with a refrigerator or air conditioner in the background? What about crickets, or an outboard motor? I’ve seen – or rather heard – of all of these removed from audio tracks with Soundtrack, and with surprisingly good results.