DV for Teachers

Pocket-Lint.com reports: Cisco kills Flip Video – Pocket-lint.

“Stopping the business rather than selling it was the best course of action,” Cisco’s global head of public relations exclusively told Pocket-lint on Tuesday, in response to our query on why the sudden decision.

In the dramatic move, the company will cease all production of Flip Video products globally, but has said that it will support the company’s FlipShare service for existing customers, while it formulates a “transition plan.”

“We are making key, targeted moves as we align operations in support of our network-centric platform strategy,” said John Chambers, Cisco chairman and CEO. “As we move forward, our consumer efforts will focus on how we help our enterprise and service provider customers optimize and expand their offerings for consumers, and help ensure the network’s ability to deliver on those offerings.”

A shame. Flips are inexpensive and easy, so good for schools and teachers and kids and families and non-techies to make fun and useful video, and do it easily. Flip, we’ll miss you. Perhaps it wasn’t making enough money for Cisco; we don’t know, and the quote above, in its PR-rich gobbledygook, doesn’t enlighten. Cisco, please don’t be such a corporate beast.

Just recorded this outside a few minutes ago, uploaded via wifi to my Dropbox, and posted this here. The whole process took less than 10 minutes.

Click here to watch the video.

Update: fixed broken link to video after moving it to Public Dropbox folder. Login no longer needed.

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.

Ken Stone offers another screenshot-rich tutorial opening up some intricacies of Final Cut Studio. This time it’s Compressor 3.5 Basics. I’m still using 3.0.5, and a cranky unreliable crash-prone beast it is, but I don’t want to upgrade with several projects still incomplete. I hope to upgrade by January though. (January! Only 38 days away! Yikes!)

This is nice:

Catch the action taking place on your screen with screen recording. Start recording and QuickTime Player captures the activity on your screen and creates a movie file. It’s perfect for creating instructional media or when you need more than a simple screen shot.

Via Daring Fireball.

A quick post on my day off to HyperTRANSCRIBE 1.5, an inexpensive at $99 QuickTime-based transcription tool. Many in our college need such tools, and they have a Windows version. Must look into this.

Taping a science teaching demonstration in Dr. Brian Williams class, a preliminary to a series of podcasts were going to produce. Shooting film-canister rockets fueled by Alka Seltzer in the park! (Clip to follow; posted from my phone.)

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.

Encoding for YouTube Part 3…HD Strikes Back

Ken Stone’s latest includes tips for making your YouTube video look great in HD. Look at these screenshot details from the standard and HD versions of a video:

How to Insert YouTube Videos in PowerPoint Presentations
It’s not painless, but it works!