A quick link to a thorough piece on compressing for YouTube: How To Make YouTube Videos Look Great. The author covers several methods, platforms, and compressors, including Divx, Flash, and QuickTime, and provides links to samples. Very well done – if you want to learn about video compression for the web, whether for YouTube or some other site, you’ll do well to bookmark this.
The apparently tireless Miguel Guhlin offers a very useful tutorial showing a method for converting FLV to MOV using VLC Media Player. This means FLV-based media can be easily put on multimedia devices, like iPhones and iPods. Nice.
GarageBand ‘08: A Review for Podcasters – O’Reilly Digital Media Blog
GarageBand ‘08 (or GarageBand 4, whichever name you want to call it) includes many time-saving and headache-saving improvements over the previous version. It also includes some new features that – if used properly – will improve the overall sound and quality of your podcast. For a heavy GarageBand user, I see these improvements as nearly worth the $80 pricetag for the iLife suite. Of course, iLife includes iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, and iWeb in addition to GarageBand, so the purchase should be a no-brainer for the Mac-based podcaster.
Sounds good to me. It’s way past time for me to start podcasting – there are so many things around the ITC that need video tutorials, and there are bound to be people who need that information too. Keep an eye out, because they’re coming.
The newsletter from eSchool News pointed this morning to The Futures Channel, which says their “Movies and Activities Deliver Hands-On, Real World Math and Science Lessons To Your Classroom.”
To produce and distribute high quality multimedia content which educators in any setting can use to enliven curriculum, engage students and otherwise enhance the learning experience.To connect mathematics, science, technology and engineering to the real world of careers and achievement, so that students can envision a context and purpose for what they are learning allowing them to envision their own successful futures.
To provide a channel through which professionals from the sciences, engineering and technology sectors can reach their future workforce prospects and interest them in their fields.
I scanned a couple of their videos, and they have great production values. I’d suggest giving this site and its videos a close look; you may find them very helpful.
Eric Faulkner posted his curriculum and resources for video projects suitable for middle-schoolers. Nicely laid out with specific assignments, rubrics, a variety of jobs for each student to rotate through, and more. Recommended.
Edit: via Eric’s posting on the EdTech list.
Looking around their site, I found their recipe for a Jelly Bug, the “semi-transparent logos that sit in the corner and look like they are made from glass”. A good how-to with screenshots.
ConsumerElectronics.net reports:
The age of Hi Def home movies for the average person has arrived. Barely a week after announcing a pair of new professional HD camcorders, Canon dropped the other shoe by unveiling the HV10, a palm-sized camcorder that shoots true 1080 HDV video.
There have been HD edit systems for over a year now, but not too many places to watch HD. With this inexpensive camera for making HD, it’s one less barrier to adoption of this new standard. I think it’s still too soon for most educators to consider switching to producing HD, though. How soon will you have HD-ready video monitors in your classrooms? Not too soon, I’d guess.
Video Production Q&A: Multicamera Production
Q: Can you produce a multicamera shoot with low-cost switchers and cameras? We’re currently producing school productions with two and sometimes three DV camcorders…
Charlie White offers ideas for multi-camera shoots for later editing. This is not the last word, but it offers some decent workarounds for those of us with “generous” education budgets.
I’ve never done much with GarageBand, but these instructional videos should make it easy to get started.
The ability to play video inside a Flash SWF file was introduced with the release of Flash MX, which opened up many new and exciting opportunities for Flash developers. Both Macromedia/Adobe and third-party developers have further upgraded Flash’s video capabilities with the introduction of powerful encoders and batch processing applications. James Gonzalez reviews Sorenson Squeeze 4, one of the leading third-party Flash video-encoding applications, and shows you how to create high-quality Flash video by using this nifty tool.
A good overview. The advantages of Squeeze are the ability to compress to most online video formats:
Although I focus on Flash-based video encoding in this article, depending on the version of Squeeze you purchase, Squeeze also encodes video to the QuickTime, MPEG-4, RealMedia, MPEG-1 and 2 (including the VCD, SVCD, and DVD MPEG Specifications), and Windows Media formats.
I’m increasingly _dis_enchanted with the proprietary formats – QuickTime, Real, Windows Media, Flash – because of the difficulty of easily creating a file that works across players and platforms without paying a lot for the compressor. in my experience, the varieties of MPEG play well all over, but compressing them isn’t easily done from raw video with readily available tools, and they’re bandwidth-heavy.