Class Twelve: Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Class Twelve Topics
Review
Assignments from Class Eleven
For the last assignment, you were asked to:
plore at least one of the online video editing sites listed on the Class 11 page, or a similar resource of your own choosing. The goal is to explore the site and its capabilities to see if it is useful for educators and/or students.
When you have completed your review, go to the course discussion blog at: http://cuin7346.blogspot.com/ and under Discussion Assignment Eleven, post a comment in which you discuss the online tool you evaluated and include specific details about what the site offers and whether you feel it would be helpful to educators and students or not.
| I have used Photobucket for quite some time and have seen it grow from simply a place to upload images online to being able to easily create videos and other neat things such as photo cubes. Photobucket is easy to use and can store a large amount of pictures. Photobucket creates the user's display choice (video, slideshows, photo cubes, etc.) and then gives the user the embed code for the user to easily add the product to a website. I also have recently played around with One True Media. I will note that when uploading images to One True Media that Photobucket is one of the options of where to obtain images from. Like Photobucket, OTM is easy to use. The user simply uploads the images desired which are then automatically put into a slideshow with transistions. The user has the option to edit these transisitions. The user can also add motion, captioning, audio, styles, and effects. The user is able to upload 100 MB per month and supports a wide range of media including AVI files and 3G mobile videos. I think this would be a fun and easy way for teachers to create videos. Hopefully a web-based video editing tool like this would inspire them to want to do more. |
|
Hi y’all. I started checking out the sites with Photobucket, then Jaycut,
Jumpcut, etc. Photobucket’s examples were easy to follow. I followed the
color splash tutorial. It made getting the special effect so simple I was
impressed. Photoshop offers similar effects but is daunting for beginners.
Photobucket makes it easy as 1,2,3... Went on to Jaycut and watched some
examples. The site is quite a contrast to Photobucket. Samples were from the
pedestrian end of the spectrum: From the pointless burning snowmobile to the
kid on a horse and then on to absolutely pointless violence of some guys
breaking things and beating each other up. So I continued on to Onetruemedia.
At this site the samples were “transition happy” with cheesy graphics. I
felt like I was shopping the scrapbooking section at HobbyLobby. But I
watched some samples and saw what a serious minded young person can do with
cheesy effects and have to confess if I were their teacher I would be
thrilled at the clarity of their expression and the good use of those cheesy
effects. Moving on to Jumpcuts I read that they are closing and then I
remembered that someone said the same in class. I think it was Shaunna and
that reminded me of Animoto so I went over to their site and signed up. She
had a cool example in class I thought I’d follow so I uploaded fifteen
photos and clicked once or twice and presto Animoto showed me a short
digital narrative of my photos. Super easy and it looked awful: All
transition, no content. From staircase dissolve to dizzying spinouts the
whole thing looked like a game of fifty-two card pick-up. The memory of
Shaunna’s example is better than what I saw the program do with my photos.
Again, though, it was super easy. That seems to be the theme of all these
free editing sites. They want to give you a super video in three easy steps.
Which is great for beginners, but I find myself worrying about the long term
effects of template mentality. Easy video sites are the coloring books of
today. They are fine place to start—though there are teachers who vehemently
would disagree about that point—but they quickly become a creativity damper. The best result I got last night was using a photoslide program on Microsoft Mobile 6.1. It’s on the phone I’m learning and it was super easy. Just four steps: Open a program, select slides, open menu, click on a dropdown, done. The program’s results are watchable. There were no eye-popping transitions, it’s just zoom and pan effects so the focus is on the content of the images rather than the animation. The music is lame, but I like the fact that I can have a video of one of my sculptures on my hip ready to share anytime, anywhere is real Buck Rogers for this dinosaur. |
|
I chose to review GoAnimate.com for this assignment. The website allows
you to create an animation, slideshow presentation, or a personalized
e-card that you can add music or narration to. The highlight is that you
can add comic book inspired word bubbles for key points or add animated
characters intermittently throughout the entire presentation. GoAnimate
offers a variety of themed channels, such as political figures, Star
Trek, Street Fighter and Happy Bunny. All animations, including
user-made animations, can be linked to, embedded or shared on email and
social networks like Facebook. Creating the animations involves a simple
timeline with which you choose from a set of specified characters (they
are currently working on developing a way to upload swf files to create
personalized characters), select actions, save and then preview. At this moment I am still waiting for my registration to go through, so I will try to create an example tomorrow and link to it for everyone to see the program’s capabilities. At first glance, I can see that GoAnimate.com is geared more towards pure entertainment and has potentially unacceptable content, however as with most other similar tools, it could always be used to create something educationally meaningful if placed in the right hands. |
| I checked out Moviemasher. The interface was very simple and easy to use like Premiere Elements, but it did have the look and feel of something that a middle school student would use to make music videos. It was free, but the download process of opening the applet and then following six "easy" steps to download is probably too complicated for me and might be overly complicated for a classroom setting where time is at a premium. I also was not immediately sure if the video could be edited and saved as an AVI file or as a Shockwave only. I would probably use Premiere Elements instead of Moviemasher for editing videos in a classroom setting. |
|
I reviewed several of the websites and tried out the Adobe Photobucket.
It is pretty easy to use. The great benefit of all of these websites is
that they have a place to post your videos, which, without a hosted
website of some size, tends to be a barrier. But as Dr. Robin noted,
none of these editing programs offers the bells and whistles of Vegas,
Premiere, or other full video editors. And once I start using one I'd
prefer to stick with it rather than using a variety, unless the others
perform specific functions not done on the others. Mostly this week I have been trying to develop and compile the introductory segment of my final class video. I have run into some problems with this. Probably most aggravating is that some - but not all - AVI files are not read by some - but not all - computers, when you are using Sony Vegas. I initially thought this was a problem of not having all of the video clips I was using in the same folder, but its not the case. In researching the problem, it appears that sometimes the CODECs are not read properly, but I still don't understand why it would vary for a given file from one computer to another. The problem is that sometimes you can bring a file into the editor, do the editing, but when you go to render the file, the image is black. In other cases, on another computer, you try to bring the file into the editor and the editor cannot see the file at all. Since I've assembled quite a large number of video segments, it will be a time consuming task to try and convert them all to some format which can be depended upon to be universally read. I was looking for some specific segments, and found Youtube frequently had what I needed. In many cases, when looking for background music, Youtube had what I needed - for instance an instrumental version of the Star Trek Enterprise TV show theme, which originally was a vocal. But in a few instances where it did not, I tried copying from VHS. The quality of the VHS is noticeably much poorer, and in a couple instances I decided to go ahead and purchase DVDs of the programs I already had on VHS. It was suggested in last week's class that I compile several short segments. I was a bit concerned about going with segments of only a few seconds, but in reviewing several movies and TV programs (the Aviator, From the Earth to the Moon, the Spirit of St. Louis), I found that brief 3-5 second clips were frequently used to show air/spacecraft interspersed with videos of people. The problem with using these very short segments in a remix is that they don't offer much in terms of an overlap for fading from segment to segment. |
Students will have time in class this week to continue working on their
final semester projects.
Assignments for Next
Class
Reading Assignment
Hands-On Assignment
The final weekly assignment will be to produce a CD or DVD of your final semester project and post a message on the Course Discussion Blog about the experience. This assignment is not due until May 13, 2009.
