DV for Teachers

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—

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.

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.

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.

Encoding for Windows Media Using Compressor – Flip4Mac

Ken Stone’s site has it:

Let’s face it, for as much as we revere our Macs, we unfortunately live in a PC world. When delivering content for the web we also have to realize that a large population of the viewing audience will watch our movies on PCs and, unlike our Macs, those PCs do not come pre-installed with QuickTime. Even though the QuickTime player (and browser plug-in) is free for PC users, there are many instances where you may have to additionally distribute movies as Windows Media or where WMV is the only viable option.

This isn’t the first external video-to-USB adapter I’ve seen, but as reported in Consumer Electronics.net’s Creative’s Video Blaster Editor, it offers lots for formats and more than one editing package, including a full version of the estimable Premiere Elements 2.0.

Video editing can be a daunting task for those who are unfamiliar with the terminology and hardware that is required to capture video to the PC. And not all PCs come with a FireWire, composite, or S-video connection that enables the capture of video from a camcorder, VCR or other video device. But all PCs today ship with USB ports, and people know that plugging a device into a USB port enables them to do magical things. Creative’s Video Blaster Editor has turned what traditionally has been a “crack open the PC case solution” into a plug the USB cable into the PC solution, easing the way for people to capture and edit video.

For $199 retail, it’s worth a look.

Almost Happy New Year. EasyWMA will convert Windows Media files to iPod- and Mac-friendly formats. Untested by me; free demo available, and shareware licenses are $10.

Lifehacker points to Any Video Converter. Looks good, but couldn’t download this at posting time; seems their server was overloaded, thus I haven’t tested it. Lifehacker’s recommendations are pretty reliable, though, in my experience.

Windows only: Convert nearly any video format to nearly any other video format with the aptly named Any Video Converter.

The program supports just about every video format known to man, including AVI, DivX, FLV, RM, and VOB. It also comes with output profiles for devices like the iPod and PSP, though you can easily create a custom profile with the audio and video specs of your choosing.

AVC couldn’t be much easier to use, and it supports batch conversions—always a nice perk. You’ll definitely want to add this utility to your video arsenal (though don’t overlook Videora Converter, arguably a better choice for converting videos for mobile devices). Any Video Converter is free for Windows.