DV for Teachers

John Gruber pointed to this video made entirely on an iPhone 4: “Apple of My Eye” – an iPhone 4 film on Vimeo.

Further evidence that it’s not the tools, but how you use them.

I’m looking for a good batch file renamer for my photo workflow, and bingo here’s a how-to for Automator from the auuthoritative folks at Peachpit Publishing. They publish terrific instructional books on all kinds of applications.

Via Peachpit’s Automator for Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, Working with Actions Locating Actions to Do What You Want

calibre plus Sigil equals formatting for epub, which works in iBooks for iPad and iPhone, and maybe for books for your students and your school!

Via Macintouch.

There’s a lot to unpack here, and I can’t do it for the moment, but if you’re looking to do some serious live streaming, Harvard’s Larry Bouthillier explains how they streamed this year’s commencement for just about every platform: PCs, Macs, iPod/iPhone/iPad, Android, and Blackberry.

LearningAPI » More on live mobile streaming.

I don’t know how many people it involved, and that would be good information, but Larry discusses what tools they used and some of the gotchas. Overall, he says, it was ultimately a big success. A/V synch on the encoding system was a big issue, as was consistency across different models of Android and Blackberry phones on different carriers. He didn’t specify which combos were problematic, but said that iPhones and iPads “were the easiest to support fully.” Hmmmm.

Download Squad reports that the open-source video processing app FFmpeg has updated with support for Google’s recently open-sourced VP8 codec and the WebM container. More than 100 video viewing and conversion apps use FFmpeg, so you may have it and not know it. One of the best-known is VLC, the plays-anything media player.

More about FFmpeg on Wikipedia.

I do not like Safari’s keyboard shortcuts to move among browser tabs.

⌘⇧{ or ⌘⇧} Command+Shift+Curly Bracket

^⇧⇥ Control+Shift+Tab

I much prefer the standard in the two other browsers I use most: Firefox and Camino:

⌘⌥⇠ or ⌘⌥⇢ Command+Option+Right or Left Arrow

That is all.

I didn’t know Paintbrush existed. From the site:

Paintbrush can open and save to most major image formats, including BMP, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, and GIF. Full support for transparency is available for image formats which support an alpha channel (currently PNGs and GIFs). You can also paste images copied from many common Mac applications, including Microsoft Office and Apple iWork.

I gave a talk three weeks ago (omg time has flown) to the Atlanta chapter of MCA-I about social networking, and use of the web for building and maintaining connections with colleagues, peers, and clients. Below the jump are many many links to the sites we visited during the lively discussion.

Before I get to the mechanics of everything in this post, I want to say a bit about why to do all this, and it’s much more than “branding” yourself. I had not long before found a post on 3 Quarks Daily, a group blog on current affairs, about thinking and working in this new economy and this new century. It was a link to an interview and podcast with Seth Godin, an unconventional marketing consultant and author. In this service economy, most of us have to provide something unique—there are videographers and editors all over. To be successful, Godin asserts that we have do our work as an artist would, to add ourselves in essential ways to what we do. After listening to this podcast a few times, and starting to read his blog, I’ve tried to consciously bring more of that attitude to what I do, and I encourage you to do that as well, and tell the story of it through social media. Now, to the links:

Video JS would appear to be a working solution to the webm vs. Apple vs. Flash sabre rattling. Their site claims to support (or gracefully fall back to Flash support within) all browsers. I’m not enough of a web developer to be able to assess, but some upcoming projects make this worth tagging and linking to.

Video JS is a javascript-based video player that uses the HTML5 video functionality built into advanced browsers. In general, the benefit of using an HTML5 player is a consistent look between browsers.

Check it out, if you embed media at all.