EDLD 5365 Course Reflection

This course was titled Multimedia and Video Technology. I went into this course comfortable with the content due to my Broadcast Journalism background. I anticipated creating a video with a storyboard and editing it. This proved to be the case with the course. I felt my expectations and the course outcomes aligned very well. The course also included a few pieces I had not anticipated such as file compression issues and attempting to collaborate on a video without ever being in the same location as my partners.
These outcomes are very relevant to what I do in my daily work. As the Desktop Publishing teacher, I deal with students using all forms of media. Learning about other editing software available and working with files in other formats will help me guide my students.
The only outcome I feel I did not achieve was not being able to get a few shots I would have liked to have for our PSA video. This was complicated by the collaboration factor as we all strived to complete our back to school organization and beginning of teaching classes while finding time to work together on our class projects. I think the collaboration proved invaluable however as our ideas came together as we worked and each of us was able to pick up some of the load for the others as we each experienced some obstacles in our time.
I learned that I have a good understanding of the technical aspects of video production, but still need to master more of the html coding for things such as posting a Creative Commons license on my work. I need to be able to trust my partners to provide solid work because they never let me down.

Web Conference 9-19

I participated in a web conference with my professor and classmates on Sunday, September 19th. We have had many instances where the video and audio portions are not working correctly. In this particular web conference, I could see several of the participants, but was not able to hear any discussion. It appeared that the entire group was experiencing the same problem, possibly due to some weather issues. The conference was conducted on the chat feature of the program. As in most of our web conferences we focused on answering questions the students had about their assignments. I was surprised at some of the questions. Dr. Abernathy continued to remind students of the time limit and they kept asking if it was ok to go over by a few seconds. While I understand it is the first time many have attempted a task like this, I have worked in radio and television, so I understood the time limit to be a firm limit. It was good to see people collaborating and helping each other out.

PSA on Cyberbullying

As part of my coursework for my graduate class, I participated with a group of fellow students to produce a one minute Public Service Announcement on Cyberbullying.
x

Stand Up to Cyberbullying by Janet Armstrong, Priscilla Summers, Charlotte Spencer, Gail Dunn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.
Our group began the creative process by each of us coming up with a topic and storyline idea. We discussed these through email and decided on cyberbullying. We each contributed a script idea and collaborated to use the best ideas of each. As I had the most experience with video, I prepared the initial shot list and my teammates completed the script. We discussed the availability of equipment and locations as we are spread over the state. We came up with an over all plan and assigned roles for each of us. We determined I should do the actual editing since I had some experience. The video was shot by one team member and the others contributed the voice overs and production documents. We decided on the web delivery format to be YouTube because it is a simple upload from iMovie. One member secured the copyright attribution for our video. We used no copyright material from other sources, so no attribution was necessary.
Our video could be improved by reshooting a few of the segments for clarity and having a more direct action statement. Overall, our team worked together and collaborated very well. Everyone was willing to do their part and tried very hard to make the video a success.

Video Editing with iMovie

This week I created a podcast on how to begin editing video using iMovie software.
Video Editing with iMovie

Creative Video Editing in iMovie by Gail Dunn is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

While creating the podcast and sharing the link were easy tasks, waiting for the embed code to be created by the podcast host was a long process.

Video Editing Software

This week I looked at some video editing software. One of the programs, iMovie, I had used previously. The other program, Debug Mode's Wax, I had never seen before. I have found iMovie to be a fairly simple straightforward program that students tend to be able to operate with minimal confusion. Apple also offers an excellent video tutorial to explain the basic editing packages installed. There is a selection of themes with built in transitions and titles to make the overall package more professional in appearance. The other advantage to using an Apple software package on a Macbook or iMac computer is the compatibility of all the products. Aside from the standard royalty free music clips included in iMovie, a user can create their own soundtrack in GarageBand and import it directly to iMovie. Still photos can be added directly from iPhoto and the iTunes library is available as well (assuming all copyright laws are followed.) Overall, iMovie has enough bells and whistles to challenge an advanced student but is easy enough for a novice to produce a quality video clip.

The Wax software appeared to be a decent choice for a freeware product. It has a large number of effects which tend to fascinate students, but it is not as simple to operate as iMovie or Windows Movie Maker. One big advantage to the program is that it can function as a plug in to Adobe Premiere Elements which is the standard in many schools. It is not as graphic as the iMovie program. You do not see the segments as you roll over them with the mouse. The number of available effects is good and the variety of those effects is surprising in a free software. The user guide does a good job of explaining the program, but it takes a while to actually figure out how each of the elements work together.

Based on my previous experience with several video editing programs I feel this was an interesting learning experience, to see what is available for free use and be able to compare several of the programs side by side on the same video clips. Previously I have learned how to edit the video clips to make a movie and how to export those projects in .mov files for QuickTime and .MSWMM for Windows Movie Maker. I added exporting in .flv files through this course and learned new tricks to compress files. Through making the videos and podcasts this week I have learned that I should investigate a wider range of products in the future in order to accommodate multiple avenues of getting a project completed.

As Charlotte Spencer pointed out in her blog on this same subject, many times we need to be able to convert our videos from one format to another.  Her discussion included some packages I had not used before. For my own file conversion I used Zamzar.

Video production will continue to play a role in education for years to come. As a teacher, I will need to improve my skills on the more technical components and make sure I am able to use the developing technologies with students to improve their critical thinking, attention to detail, and abilities to handle new and improved technologies as they come along.

Spencer, Charlotte. (2010, Sept 4) Evaluating Video Editing Software. [Web log comment] Retrieved from: http://charlottecspencer.blogspot.com/ Sept. 5, 2010