At Studio Daily, Lonzell Watson provides his concise method to Remove Unwanted Noise from Clips in Apple Soundtrack Pro 2. No audio samples, but a clear step-by-step with screenshots aplenty. If you don’t know this trick, you should. Ever have to work with an audio track with a refrigerator or air conditioner in the background? What about crickets, or an outboard motor? I’ve seen – or rather heard – of all of these removed from audio tracks with Soundtrack, and with surprisingly good results.

The Blog from Another Dimension offers this advice for those going From Windows to Mac: Three Biggest Tips for Switchers:

Having helped several people make the switch from Windows to Macs, I have seen pretty clearly some common problems people have when making the switch. Walt Mossberg wrote a short article on this, and his observations are pretty spot-on, albeit abbreviated and limited. I just figured I’d do my own long-winded version.

Modesty doesn’t serve this blogger well. What he calls “long-winded” I find to be thorough, with well-annotated screenshots and good explanations, and more than the three tips he promises. Most Mac users as well as recent switchers and those considering the change will find good information here.

Ahh, formats. There are so many: still using DV tape? Or have you switched to a DVD-based MPEG-2 format? Maybe you use a hard-drive or flash-memory kind of camcorder? Whichever you use, do you know the ins and outs of what it takes to edit that format properly? You need to make sure your system is up to the task, but what about that codec, and I need to output to DVD and the web, but yikes everyone looks blue in that shot, and….

We don’t have all the solutions here, but Andrew Balis, a long-time contributor to Ken Stone’s site and major FCP maven, provides one piece of the puzzle as he explains Color Workflows With Different Types of Sources:

One of the most confusing issues that comes up frequently with new users of Color is how to get in and out of Color with different types of video formats. Therefore, the purpose of this article is to clear up the confusion by presenting the four main workflows Color can utilize, as well as how each format can be handled by Color. This article relates to users of Color version 1.0.2 or later. Well look at how to handle video formats captured via capture card, as well as how to work with “native” formats captured via FireWire such as DV, DVCPRO 50, DVCPRO HD and HDV.

Even if your footage is color correct from the word “Action!”, if you need some help understanding aspects of the different types of video, this article is worth reading and bookmarking.

Come back to this NECC2008 Classroom 2.0 Birds of a Feather page linked here to find what links people post. I’ve also put it in my feed reader*. Yes! I asked for help in choosing some of these tools to model at Georgia State, and have hope. I really want a magic bullet, someone who’ll say “Oh. Do this. That’s all you need.” I also really want a pony, etc.

What this means is I have to jump in, thrash about, look for the edge of the pool, and maybe holler for a lifeguard. And through this blog, and now Twitter and Ning, I think I’ll have answers to my hollering, so, good.

And I must reduce the number of feeds. Eeesh.

I posted most of my notes about Saturday’s EduBloggerCon at NECC at my wikispaces wiki, and I’ll be coming back here to reflect and think through some of it. I’ve started a Ning network, too, and added lots of folks on Twitter.

Speaking of reflection, I was a little reluctant to come this year… I’ve felt a bit static in my work, that blogging more than an irregular pointer to a good multimedia link was too much effort, much less producing podcasts, reflecting here, finding opportunities for doing more teaching and presenting. I have let looking at my usual technology (and other) sites be much too much of my online life. There are many many other professionals like me out there, and now I see how social/educational networked sites can work; there’s more to it then “friending” someone.

I’ve met some good folks, folks I’ll connect with more, I’m sure. You can read about them at my Ning site.

All computers have disk drives. All disk drives are machines. All machines will, eventually, break down. (It’s kind of a rule – moving parts, friction, heat, wear, entropy, etc.) Robert Palmer of The Unofficial Apple Weblog gives extremely valuable information on recovering data from a bad disk in What to do when a disk goes bad:

We’ve all been there. The external disk you bought three or four years ago, which has been working great so far, starts to click. And its not a good click … its the kind of click that gives you the spinning beach ball of death.

The post covers several eventualities and solutions with good explanations and links. A valuable resource if you have, you know, a computer. With a disk drive.

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.

A simple and beautiful tool for adjusting the volume of selected clips throughout an entire Final Cut project, without going through to do it by hand. Oh I could have used this many many times. Thanks to Digital Media Net for keeping the tips coming. Now if they’d just ease back on the incredible number of ads in Flash on their sites….