DV for Teachers

I’ve been on the Creative Cow email list for years now, and while The Creative Cow—Creative Communities of the World—deserves its popularity for providing support for the myriad video and multimedia development apps out there, it hasn’t always provided articles or tutorials that served my immediate needs. Today, though, I discovered their Final Cut Pro podcast and I’m bowled over at how the tutorials they’ve posted cover so many topics I’ve wanted help with: title animation in Motion, Photoshop-to-video, and more more more. I haven’t watched them all, so I can’t comment on their overall quality, but if they’re in the same league as their written tutorials then this is a valuable resource. Go for the Cow.

Andrew Balis answers his own question, at great length, and to the benefit of us all, in Am I Rendering And Viewing At The Best Quality With FCP?

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.

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.

Via Creative Cow’s newsletter, I learned of Shane Ross’s Ultimate FCP FAQ, Part 3. After scanning it, I realized this was a good list of tips that can really save time and aggravation.

“Part 3?” I said to myself… so I checked out Part 1 and Part 2. Well worth bookmarking if you use FCP. Among some pointers, Shane tells you how to save your project so it can be opened in an earlier version of Final Cut, why capturing with iMovie doesn’t work well with Final Cut, tips for backing up your project once you’re done, and much more. That’s worth a bookmark right there.

Thanks, Shane.

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.

Macworld posted this video showing of some of the nice new things Finder can do with images and in dialog boxes while opening or saving files. Worth watching.

Macintouch points to an update of Flip4Mac’s QuickTime plugin to play Windows Media and a security update for Office 2004

Switch is a free audio format converter for Mac or Windows. Working on podcasts? Can’t get your Windows Media Audio files to work? Change to MP3 or other formats with this tool. Here’s a complete list of formats for importing or exporting. It even converts batches – so have your students submit their files to you and convert them all at once to the format you need for distribution.