DV for Teachers

I’m cheating twice here; bear with me. First cheat, I didn’t link to Part 1. It, and the point of this post, Part 2, have been floating in open tabs in my browser for too many weeks. It’s embarrassing, really. I should have posted these things a long time ago, but “I’ll do it later” is a constant refrain in my head and my life. (Ask my wife, or several of the people I work with.)

!

(On second thought, please don’t!)

The point, again, of this post: a series on Peachpit about Equipment for Video Podcasting, which covers an extensive amount of information, with pics and links, provides a very good one-stop reference about video podcasting (well, two, really, unless you think of the series as a single thing with separate parts).

And my second cheat? Those links point to the print-ready versions of the articles, because the originals are split into seven or eight shorter chunks requiring reloading the pages and that’s kind of cheating. At least I think it isn’t, so I’m counter-cheating.

Enjoy the articles.

I think jose. I do. I met him – only briefly – when he recorded an interview Ellen and I did last weekend at the National Storytelling Festival. The organizers of the festival were collecting peoples’ stories from their own experience in Jonesborough and at the festival over the years. The first time I went, 11 years ago, I had a memorable time and was part of a great onstage story. I’ll tell that tale here another time, but I want here to point to Jose’s site, which documents his many interests, achievements, and areas of expertise.

If you’re i his area, check him out, and if you’re not, check his site – there’s lots he knows about and can help you with.

Think Jose!

Well, I am re-evaluting my opinion of the not-so-new “new” iMovie. I was so used to the older version, iMovie HD, which had been expanded but not fundamentally changed, since it was introduced in 1999 (Ten years? Yow).

Ken Stone, a source for so much great Final Cut information, posted the most complete one-page overview of iMovie I’ve ever seen. He loves it:

So why am I writing about iMovie 09 if I work in FCP? The answer is simple. At the demonstration I saw a number of features in iMovie 09, that I wished were in FCP and I wondered if there was a way to use iMovie 09 in conjunction with FCP, utilizing some of its features to supplement the FCP workflow, most importantly in the rough cut phase of editing, as ‘09’ has an amazing skimming/edit tool. iMovie also sports a new and modern tool for exact clip trimming, the Precision Editor, and it’s stunning. And, iMovie provides full Real Time playback, no rendering required, ever.
[...]
iMovie is very intuitive and easy to use, despite the fact that it has some very advanced features, features that it would be nice to see incorporated into Apple’s other editing application, Final Cut Pro. iMovie is a very modern editing application and it works in a much more visual way than editing applications that were first created over a decade ago. This graphical aspect of iMovie is more persuasive and powerful than one might first suspect. And don’t let the fact that iMovie ships in the iLife package and comes free on new Macs fool you, this is an amazingly modern and capable editing application.

The article has 25 sections in a single page, all linked for easy navigations, and it’s full of screenshots to illustrate just what Ken likes and why. Ken even provides instructions for downloading and saving the page for offline use—printed it would go to more than 120 pages!

This is not only a detailed examination of iMovie but a great and generous example of technical writing

I saw some very engaging student projects while judging at the Festival—previous post here. There were 160 judges there, working into the afternoon judging several categories, all hosted in the facilities of Georgia Public Broadcasting.

I worked with an instructional technologist from Muscogee County and a library media specialist from Fulton County. We looked at several student-created web sites, most on CD and some online. Lots of good creative work, some were rather cookie-cutter, and one or two a bit misguided or unfortunately marred by broken links or missing images. I particularly liked the emphasis on citing sources as part of the projects. One nice resource I discovered is Weebly, a free website host for several of the projects. The sites I have seen had few ads, and not to distractingly placed. A nice find.

Encourage your students to participate in the festival in your school!

I am looking forward to working as a judge a the Georgia Student Media Festival on May 1st. They’ve posted several samples from last year’s Georgia festival. The International Student Media Festival is the goal of the Georgia competitors, and they have posted work from past winners. There are even more posted on SchoolTube
I signed up yesterday, and there’s lots of information on the site:

The purpose of the festival is to stimiulate student interest and involvement in all types of media production. This is accomplished by providing an opportunity for students to show their work to an interested audience, to have their work critiqued by a panel of expert judges, and to be stimulated by the work of other students.

The students worked really hard on the samples I’ve viewed, and I’ll watch more before the Festival. I’ll try to blog a bit from the competition, but more for sure on this the week after!

Today I’m showing some ECE students how to find and use free photos on their edublogs. Here’s a nice airplane from János at flickr.com to illustrate!

Before I do that, I want to make sure everyone knows how to find images that are licensed for reuse. The Creative Commons license allows that, as long as you provide attribution – i.e., you have to give credit to the photographer. This video from the Creative Commons site makes it easy to learn how to search for CC-licensed images using the Firefox browser.

Watched the video? Know how to make sure your images are licensed for putting in your blog? Let’s go:

Among my favorite sources for this is flickr, with tons of images under the CC license from professional and amateur photographers around the world.

I’ve posted more stock image sources here and here and here at DV for Teachers. Have fun!

x-posted.

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.

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.

The knowledgable folks at TidBITS like the changes in the new iMovie ‘09”:http://db.tidbits.com/article/9984 announced yesterday at Macworld.

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.