Thanks to Macintouch for pointing this morning to the update of Audacity, the terrific free audio editor and recorder. Podcasters, video producers, journalists, and independent musicians all over the world use it every day. It’s a great tool that keeps getting better. Put on your school’s computers for your students to play with. It’s free, useful, and fun.
I’ve been on the Creative Cow email list for years now, and while The Creative Cow—Creative Communities of the World—deserves its popularity for providing support for the myriad video and multimedia development apps out there, it hasn’t always provided articles or tutorials that served my immediate needs. Today, though, I discovered their Final Cut Pro podcast and I’m bowled over at how the tutorials they’ve posted cover so many topics I’ve wanted help with: title animation in Motion, Photoshop-to-video, and more more more. I haven’t watched them all, so I can’t comment on their overall quality, but if they’re in the same league as their written tutorials then this is a valuable resource. Go for the Cow.
I stayed home yesterday, and I was able to watch the inauguration and much of the following festivities. I was moved by the historic and inspiring spectacle. Today, for President Barack Obama, the job for which he worked so hard begins. I am moved to renew my commitment to do the best work I can, at the office and at home and here on this little blog. There’s a boatload of work to do. Here we go.
Alex Gollner’s site of Final Cut Pro tips and plugins, including mattes, transitions, and some scrolling text tools that look very useful. Free.
A site called Six Revisions points to 30 Excellent Resources for Graphic Design Freebies. Haven’t checked them all, so I can’t comment on their “excellence,” but free is a good place to start if you need not-stale graphics for your school publication, presentation, or video.
Macworld magazine reviews the changes added (some added back) to iMovie 09. More information at Apple’s iMovie page as well.
This introduction is “gentle” only in technical terms; Mark Pilgrim’s language can get quite salty, so if your school’s filters block four-letter words, you’ll need to read this at home. Nonetheless, the four part A Gentle Introduction to Video Encoding (part one, part two, part three, part four) is an excellent introduction to concepts, terminology, patent status, and limitations of the formats. It does not provide any instruction or tutorials, but those are widely available through the Google.
The knowledgable folks at TidBITS like the changes in the new iMovie ‘09”:http://db.tidbits.com/article/9984 announced yesterday at Macworld.
This list is very thorough. In Amit Agarwal’s How to Embed Almost Anything in your Website you’ll find tips on embedding:
