DV for Teachers

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.

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.

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!