My Brain Hurts

A lot has been said about iMovie ‘08 since it’s release, mostly condemning. Being likewise unimpressed with iMovie ‘08, when it came to running an iMovie session at ITSC I intended using iMovie HD. However, as it was said to me, we need to move forward so ‘08 became the number of the counting. The session began with a round table gripe about “where is this feature?” and “why doesn’t it do that any more?” This was going nowhere but downhill so during the break I asked all to purge their minds of iMovie and look on this as a completely new app.

Once we started to focus on 08’s strengths we started to appreciate it. One person in our group who had never seen iMovie at all summed it up with “I don’t know what you people are complaining about, this program is great.” Talking to Apple reps and other learned folk we came to the following conclusions.

1. This program should probably not have been called iMovie since it really isn’t a replacement for iMovie HD, so stop thinking of it as that.

2. iMovie ‘08 is for making simple quick movies, which it does really well, if you want to do heavy editing or something more serious then iMovie HD is still alive and kicking.

3. What it does really well: total control of Ken Burns effect, cropping (zooming) of clips, ducking, audio files snap to fit length of video and still clips.

4. What’s really lacking: no export to GarageBand or iDVD – very strange to have a iLife app that doesn’t integrate with the other apps. Prediction – watch for an update on this feature.

So, “no negative vibes Moriarty”. Look at iMovie’08 for what it is and you will enjoy using it a lot more. It really is great app for throwing together a movie very quickly.

Many are of the opinion that YouTube is just bunch of adolescents putting up goofy videos of themselves doing stupid things, well it does has that but it has a lot of valuable educational resources as well. One example if social history recorded by ordinary people. Take any newsworthy event that you plan to cover with your class and there will probably be something there, an example of that is the numerous Tsunami videos. Many are poor quality taken with phones but they are graphic portrayals of human reactions to this event, the images and recorded voices give an interesting insight into what it was like to actually be there.

Obviously viewing live in class is the first option but many narrow minded people in power block YouTube from School network use. However all is not lost, there are a few twists along the way but it’s a fairly simple process to download these files so you can use them with your classs. A Google search on “download from YouTube” will produce many options. My favoutites are these two:

Vixy (http://vixy.net) – open the YouTube page with the video you want. Open vixy.net and copy the URL into the required space. Select one of the five target video formats available and away you go.

TechCrunch (http://www.techcrunch.com/get-youtube-movie) – open the YouTube page with the video you want. Open TechCrunch and copy the URL into the required space and away you go. The file is downloaded in the original flv format use by YouTube. You can view the file with a player such as VLC but I prefer to convert it to an mpeg using iSquint (http://www.isquint.org). This process does have an extra step but I think the final result is a better quality file.

Some Year 10 students today were telling me about their web site where they post short movies they have created which also appear on YouTube. They have 5 “movies” posted and were rightfully proud of their small site. They were using MovieMaker and agreed with me that it is a toy program and that they would love to update to some real software like Final Cut Pro. Seems like they need part time jobs. At least the school uses FCP so if they enrol in the correct unit next year they can fuel their movie passion with some real tools.

This does show how creative students want to be and their willingnes to take on new learning to fulfil a desire. The instant success of YouTube is the end result of that. Also makes you wonder what these students have to put up with if these creative spirits are not encouraged in a pencil and paper school system.