DV for Teachers

“There are a few other applications out there aimed at Mac users needing to create Windows Media Player files, including Cleaner and Flip4Mac, but only Popwire’s application comes in with an under-US$30.00 price tag. Compared to the (around) $500 price for Cleaner, and $179.00 for the Flip4Mac Pro version, I was expecting WMV-9 Export Component for QuickTime to be an application that would leave lots to be desired.

Boy was I wrong.”

Untested by me, but it sure sounds good.——-

MacAlert’s Dave Nagel:

“Telestream’s Flip4Mac WMV Studio and WMV Studio Pro advance the cause of an all-Mac production workflow by bringing Windows Media encoding and decoding to Mac OS X . More than this, the components that make up these suites are truly professional tools, with high-quality encoding to Windows Media 9 formats (Standard and Advanced); support for resolutions up to HD; support for Windows Media Audio 9 Standard, Professional and Lossless; and superb integration with any QuickTime-based workflow.”

Good reviews, decent price; we’re going to be using this, I believe.——-

Will Richardson: “So taking a cue from Bud the Teacher, I checked out Jon Udell’s post on how he creates his screencasts with Windows Media Encoder. I’d been trying to use Camtasia to do some inhouse training stuff, but it was really difficult to get the right file format and configurations to work with our servers and Windows Media Player. But Encoder did the trick. Really easy, and when I play the file off of our server, it looks crystal clear at full screen.”——-

Researching the Charlie White post below, I found Dean Rowe’s blog. Dean works with the Windows Movie Maker development team, and posts helpful tips as well as an occasional DirectShow technical explication.

Looking around there I found out that the DV Pass-Through feature now works – importing video into WMM2 using a DV camcorder or other analog/DV device on the fly without having to record on DV tape first. (And he posted this news in August of 2004…. Nice job, Tim, keeping up with the updates.) Dean points to a Microsoft DV pass-through tutorial.

If he’s right, WMM2 ought to capture from our JVC VHS/MiniDV combo VCR via analog-VHS-to-firewire-out. I’ll post when I can test it.——-

I’m doing a Windows Movie Maker workshop tomorrow morning, and looking through my blog drafts, came upon Charlie White’s introduction to WMM2. Charlie publishes all over DigitalMediaNet’s sites and publications, and this went online in January.

There are plenty of other WMM2 introductions around, and his is another good one.——-

Oh my.

Until now, creating Windows Media files has been cumbersome for Mac users. It has required a multi-step, multi-system process. First, you had to export the file, then move it over to a PC, and finally encode it using another software application. Telestream’s Flip4Mac Codec using Windows Media Technologies for QuickTime is changing all of that.

Helping someone who wanted to go from iMovie to Windows Media, I looked and found what source files work with Windows Media Encoder:

“The encoder can source from files that have the following file name extensions: .wav, .wma, .wmv, .asf, .avi, .mpg, .mp3, .bmp, and .jpg.”

So, no easy way to do it that I can see… unless capturing/exporting a full-size DV stream, changing the .dv extension to .avi, and importing to WinMovieMaker. I’ll test that now[2:20 pm]:

Later [2:41pm]: Just changing the file extension doesn’t work. I exported a .dv test file from iMovie, but Windows Movie Maker couldn’t do anything with it, even if I changed the file extension from .dv to .avi. I then exported the .dv test file from QuickTime Pro on the Windows machine with these settings:

Video:
Export:Movie to AVI
Compression: DV/DVCPRO – NTSC
Quality: Best
Frames per second: 29.97

Sound:
Format: Uncompressed
Sample rate: 48 kHz
Sample size: 16
Channels: 2 (stereo)

That imported into Wimdows Movie Maker. Next I exported from iMovie with the same settings. iMovie is QT Pro with a nice interface on it, isn’t it? =0)

In other words, the minimum processing necessary to get from the format that iMovie uses to the Windows-friendly .avi extension. The resulting file was just over 22 MB for 6 seconds, only a little more than the standard 3.6 MB a second for DV, and it imported right into Windows Movie Maker like it belonged there.

I also tried one with “None” as the compression, but it was over 120 MB and I didn’t even try to do any more with that – 20MB/second is a data rate I don’t want to fool with until it comes with HD quality.

So if you need to have an iMovie project end up in Windows Media format, this is one way to do it.

“Lots of links and resources for video stuff, especially geared for PowerPoint users…”

An excellent compendium of links, advice, and tutorials for WinMovieMaker. Very nice to find here a link to PapaJohn’s Movie Maker 2 site, full of tips, advice, and a very friendly style for all users.——-

The Special Education-Assistive Technology folks here had made video clips for a CD-ROM they also wanted to stream via the web. Their assistant asked me for help… they were MPGs, and he could convert them to QuickTime with QuickTime Pro, but no audio…. Hrmmm. I haven’t found anything that successfully converts it. Yet.

While searching, however, I came across Mighty Coach, a site with some helpful tutorials on Windows Movie Maker, among other programs. Pay particular attention to the tip on project organization and avoiding accidental deletions of important files.

An interesting development: