Debra Kaufman reports on a Digital Cinema Society session on encoding video for the web: Online Video: Codecs, Encoding and Compression for the Studio Daily Blog It’s a quick report of what must have been a much more in-depth discussion, but go for the take-away formats that have, for now, the widest reach among potential viewers.
Hey, teachers! Read How to Present While People are Twittering. See what some presenters – they’re teachers too – are doing. Use these tools to increase engagement, and your students can learn more. Technology in the hands of your students is a good thing. Go with it.
I missed the date! DV for Teachers turned eight last month. From the formerly free blogs at Userland to my current version using Wordpress hosted at Joyent, I’ve linked to and written about making and using multimedia for education. 
Through the years I’ve gone through slack blogging periods and some busy ones and learned some html and css trying to customize things. Though I’ve emphasized use of the Mac, I’ve tried to point out good tools that would work on Windows as well. I could never cover everything, and of course I could cover less more thoroughly, but this thing has always been rather ad hoc. I post about what I find or what I think of when it’s in front of me. I suppose more of a plan would be nice… my friend Stefan and I often talk about having a plan, and how useful that would be. It’s really become a sort of diary and memory bank, and once in a while I go through some of the older posts and realize how much the technology has changed and how much I’ve changed.
So please wish DV for Teachers a happy birthday! I think of this as a renewed commitment to blogging on technology and multimedia for anyone who teaches.
There are alternatives to some of the paid apps they link to in this nice list of quick tips. Regrettably I don’t have time at the moment to link to them.Those aside, this is a good list for the Mac newbie, from TechRadar UK: 69 really useful OS X timesavers | News | TechRadar UK.
I’ll be teaching a workshop shortly on Non-Linear PowerPoint Presentations. I asked the Internet for help, and the Internet came through for me. Thanks, Internet.
Update: The workshop has been cancelled, so more time to work on other projects. Yay.
Further update: Here’s a nice non-linear presentation example, and another full of other tips I find useful.
Today I need to finish a video about the college, and do a workshop right after lunch on Second Life. A busy day!
Jeff Carlson of the venerable Mac news and info site TidBITS on the immense improvements to iMovie 09, including10 coole features you may not know about. Among them: you can now apply a set of filters and effects to a clip, and then copy and paste those onto other clips in your video project. That’s a feature I use in Final Cut Pro all the time. Nice.
Andy Ihnatko in Chicago Sun-Times says Apple’s iMovie09 is a true ‘wow’ update for video software. It’s not an in-depth review (you can find several via the Google), but I appreciate what he says about the image stabilization. That’s a major improvement that likely has developers of other edit apps trying to catch up. He also loves the new interface over the older one. I’ll have to give this latest version a new look after reading this.
I had fun compositing the image with XtraLean Software’s Imagewell using Andy’s headshot from his blog, the icon from iMovie 09, and the heart icon from DryIcons. Making the image took almost no time; I spent far too long searching for the heart. Thanks to all, but especially DryIcons.
Larry Jordan is the real thing. (That’s him to the left.) His Monthly Final Cut Studio Newsletter always have lots of very useful tips for n00bs to veteran editors. I’ve linked to him several times before.
His latest has a head-slapping simple tip on quickly and easily finding keyboard shortcuts. 
In Final Cut, go to the Tools menu and choose Button List. The list comes up in a window with a disclosure triangle for each of the menus… so okay, you could go to the menus to find that. What’s excellent is the list is searchable. Type W to find all the shortcuts that use that letter; it’s a great way to make your editing go more quickly and learn the (daunting) FCP interface. Thanks, Larry!
Macworld’s Chris Breen offers a series of tips and product recommendations for recording and editing good audio.
Particularly valuable is his tip for reducing static when using USB mics.