DV for Teachers

I used to use iMovie much more often; now I do almost all my video editing in Final Cut Pro. Many in the college either use our small Mac lab for video and DVD creation or have their own Macs now. The new iLife, which incorporates iMovie, iDVD, iPhoto, and more, has achieved hit a sweet spot in power and usability. It’s still not a piece of cake for those used to Windows, but it’s stable, flexible, and really easy. Read through this exhaustive review from uber-tech site Ars Technica for a solid learning experience whether you’re a Mac rookie or experienced user.

Ars Reviews iLife ‘09: making the cut with iMovie and iPhoto – Ars Technica.

Debra Kaufman reports on a Digital Cinema Society session on encoding video for the web: Online Video: Codecs, Encoding and Compression for the Studio Daily Blog It’s a quick report of what must have been a much more in-depth discussion, but go for the take-away formats that have, for now, the widest reach among potential viewers.

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.

This list is very thorough. In Amit Agarwal’s How to Embed Almost Anything in your Website you’ll find tips on embedding:

• RSS feeds
• MP3s and other audio
• Flickr photos and slideshows
• High quality or HD YouTube videos
• Picasa web albums
• Google calendar events
• Large photographs
• Charts and graphs
• GIF animations and screencasts
• MS Word documents and PowerPoint presentations
• Spreadsheet data
• PDF files
• Flash (SWV) or Flash video (FLV)
• LinkedIn profiles
• Google maps
• Another web page
• Windows Media or QuickTime
• Other fonts

• Lifestream

  Via the delicious feed on popurls.

  Bonus: looking for an “embed” image for this post at Google, I found this—

Macintouch this morning points to Thomas Tempelmann’s Find Any File application—

Contrary to Spotlight, it does not use a database but instead uses the file system driver’s fast search operations.

This lets you search for file properties such as name, dates, size, etc., but not for file content (use Spotlight for that)!

Find Any File can find files that Spotlight doesn’t, e.g. those inside bundles and packages and in inside folders that are excluded from Spotlight search (i.e. system files).

And Find Any File is fast. Not always as fast as Spotlight, but faster than other, similar file search tools you might find for the Mac.

I need something like this. Good to find it.

Why did Textile italicize the two middle paragraphs in the block quote above?

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:

The fine coders at the VideoLAN project have updated their fine media player and encoder. Did you know that VLC, the VideoLAN client, can do all of this? From the VLC site:

• It is a free cross-platform media player
• It supports a large number of multimedia formats, without the need for additional codecs

• It can also be used as a streaming server, with extended features (video on demand, on the fly transcoding, ...)

  Add it to your video toolbox now – it’s safe and immensely useful for playing and transcoding odd video files. Download now for Mac, Windows, or Linux.

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.

John Virata heaps praise on Pinnacle’s PC-based video editor. It’s been around a long time, and he really likes the app’s continued development. It can export Flash and 3GP from the timeline, and can also export direct to YouTube.

Pinnacle Studio 12 Ultimate is probably the most full featured entry level video editing solution on the market. It has the widest support for the new AVCHD and HDV camcorders, offers the widest range of output options, and includes three non-Pinnacle applications that are integrated nicely and are designed to make your video projects more unique.