DV for Teachers

At Streamingmedia.com, Jan gives a thorough and authoritative review, and gives it very high marks on compression quality, ease of use, and speed increases.

Streamingmedia.com: Ben Waggoner, Program Manager, Microsoft Codec Team
bq. For years, Ben Waggoner’s been sharing his expertise on video codecs with the streaming industry. These days, he’s working on Windows Media, and here he provides the lowdown on the latest developments in Microsoft’s audio and video codecs.

Flip4Mac, the folks who made it possible for Windows Media video to play on Macs in the QuickTime player, now offer the Episode media encoder, with a wide variety of input and output formats, with a standard version at $395 and Pro version for $895. See the website for details.

Qualified education customers can apply for a 20% academic discount.

I’ve had a request to find codecs for viewing some security video from a business near the campus here, and the files are AVIs with an odd codec, apparently “GEOX.” MPlayer, VLC, QuickTime, Real, and Windows Media on my Mac are stumped. I’ve had no more luc (yet) on a PC. I have found the following links that might lead to some success.

http://www.google.com/search?q=codec%20geox%20-shoe
(Apparently, GEOX is also a brand of shoes, so I have to weed my searches accordingly.)

http://movavi.com/codec/GEOX.html

http://www.geovision.com.tw/english/index.asp

http://www.fourcc.org/codecs.php

http://netforbeginners.about.com/od/multimedia/f/codec.htm

John Virata reviews the Movavi VideoSuite, and it seems like a very flexible tool for basic editing and for converting files to many many different formats, including PSP, iPod, mobile phones, even QuickTime, Windows Media, MPEG, and Real. (Why would you want to put anything in Real format? But that’s another discussion.) I don’t know if it will rip encrypted DVDs; I doubt it, but wrote to Movavi and hope to find out.

I often used to link to Charles Wiltgen’s PlaybackTime, but he stopped posting more than three years ago. Thanks to a post here at The Unofficial Apple Weblog, I found out he’s back, and has been since January. And it’s nice to find him as ornery and well-informed as ever in his response to a Cory Doctorow piece against Apple’s DRM in iTunes.

Telestream has issued an update to the Flip4Mac components for playing Windows Media in your Mac’s QuickTime player.

via Macintouch.

I didn’t realize that the standard QuickTime for Windows now included iTunes – I need to look at the Windows side of things much more often. Via the Mac newsletter TidBits, here’s a link to the QuickTime-only standalone installers for Mac and Windows.

If you’re on the Mac and want to play Windows Media in your QuickTime player, download the plug-in here.

[Update: here’s a link to Part I.]

This afternoon we’re getting a quick iMovie tutorial and then they’re turning us loose to make a project. This is my first hands-on with iMovie HD, too. These folks are doing a pretty good job of making Mac-ish things comprehensible for this crowd of mostly PC users. The demo clip is a 2:44 in duration, 320×240 pixels, and 10 frames per second. Because iMovie only works with DV formatted video material, iMovie HD is taking almost 10 minutes to import this clip for editing – essentially creating an additional 20 frames per second while scaling the size up to 1440×1080. The file size will go from 4.4 MB to 1.39 GB, since we’re working in the iMovie HD default resolution. Which is too big. I ended up creating a new project in DV format; 30 frames per second, and 720×480 resolution. The file was 562 MB, still big, but much more manageable (and viewable on non-HD televisions).

At the end of the hands-on (iMovie HD’s themes are very, very nice once you get how they work), we talked about storyboards, when and when not to take the time, and showed some of the storyboarded sequence-pitch outtakes from Shrek. Which is entertaining, and shows pretty effectively how they help visually think through a story.

Finally, links to royalty free images at Stock Exchange and music at Freeplay Music, and reference books, in addition to the others mentioned (and shortly hope to have linked in Part I):

• The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories
• 20 Master Plots: And How to Build Them

• 45 Master Characters: Mythic Models for Creating Original Characters

[Updated to add Part I to the title.]

These are my notes from the morning session of the Digitally Mediated Storytelling workshop.

The “Digital Campfire”

A point to keep in mind: among other reasons kids don’t engage: many kids come to school to rest up for that night’s game session. So engage them in storytelling – not telling them a story, but telling a digital story about themselves – changes their attitudes about reading & writing

Good source: Grammar of Fantasy by Rodari

One way to start: “what would happen if…”

• you woke up as a dog
• you could suddenly fly
• everybody could suddenly fly
• the world was flat
• you could save the world

• what if gravity disappeared and you had to ‘save all the roller coasters and theme parks’

  usable to build curriculum and meet standards

  Digital cameras: if not available, use cameras in the students’ cell phones for this

  (more…)