DV for Teachers

I didn’t even know Movie Maker was missing features. We still have XP on our lab PCs, so we don’t have the latest Movie Maker. I don’t configure the PCs in our labs—so glad someone else has that enviable job—but I teach workshops on Windows Movie Maker. The newer versions have lost functions I take for granted, most importantly capture from DV via Firewire. We’ve just gotten some Flip cameras for student use, but most of our cameras are still DV-tape-based, and we have DV decks on 11 workstations. My usual browse of Lifehacker brought this portable version of Windows Movie Maker to my attention yesterday:

Based on version 2.1 of Windows Movie Maker, Portable Windows Movie Maker not only lets you use the missing features on Vista and Windows 7 systems, but it includes the missing transitions and effects from Windows XP, as well as several additional features to boot. Portable and stand-alone, you can use it when you need removed features, like analog capture, without messing with your current version of Windows Movie Maker.

Via Lifehacker which was via Download Squad which was via instant fundas which was via dvrexster who gives credit to winmatrix.

I’ve been screwing up.

I’ve taught basic workshops on Windows Movie Maker for years now, usually early in the semester. When they work on their assigned projects weeks later, too many students don’t correctly back up their unfinished video projects. They think the Project.MSWMM file is all they need, and don’t back up the video clips that go with that project. So, when they try to finish on another machine, either at home or on another PC in the labs, they see the big red X’s instead of their video clips. Result? FAIL. Must figure out how to make this clearer, but for now, find the steps after the jump.

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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.

Just a few minutes from another workshop on Windows Movie Maker. Here’s the PDF handout for keeping your files organized so you can move the project from one PC to another without losing files.

Lifehacker points to an Ask Metafilter discussion of video editors with more capabilities than Windows Movie Maker, and one of the commenters points to this nice overview from Wikipedia. I found the feature comparison very valuable, as I don’t have the opportunity to check all the editors out there.

Just so you know, you may find some salty language at Ask Metafilter, a “how do I do it” portion of its parent site, the Metafilter “community weblog.” There’s a constant stream of thoughtful and frivolous posting in both places, and it’s worth your time.

You’re working on a Windows Movie Maker project in a computer lab. You’ve gotten a lot done, but you need to save it to finish another day. How do you keep your project intact so you can finish on another computer?

The key is to remember that you need to save the Movie Maker project file and the captured .WMV video files, and keep them together in a single folder. The project file has a weird extension: .MSWMM (if you named your project BobVideo, it would look like this: BobVideo.MSWMM). This project file keeps track of your edits – which clips go in which order, when the music starts, what you cut out – but it only works by pointing to the video files you’ve captured. It doesn’t sort of absorb the video the way Word or PowerPoint do with picture files. You have to keep the video files and the project files in the same folder or they’ll lose each other.

There’s more – if you add music, or photos, they have to go in this same folder with the *.MSWMM project file and the .WMV files. See the complete how-to in this PDF: SetUpWindowsMovieMaker.pdf.

VisualHub: The Universal Video Converter for Mac.

VisualHub allows you to convert video files to one of 9 formats in as little as three steps.

I tried the demo, and it does something I’ve seen in no other cheap/free tool: export right from a VIDEO_TS folder (the format of the video on a non-copy-protected DVD) to MPEG1, a format that plays well on all platforms, all video players, and – an especially popular feature here – plays beautifully in a Microsoft PowerPoint slide without having to link to another application. It’s $23.32 shareware. Very impressive.

(I love this warning on the “Advanced Settings” window.)

Sorenson Squeeze Review

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.

[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

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